Looking Back at the Future
The imagery is right out of the Time Machine: a landscape dotted with the reminders of a once great era. Washington Post describes how “the Obama administration is supporting bipartisan legislation in Congress that would designate sites in Oak Ridge; Hanford, Wash.; and Los Alamos, N.M., as national parks.” These labs, which once represented the future are now reminders of the past. Their fate represents the effect of the loss of its original mission. Their current funding structure represents the jobs they’ve had to take in to keep their people emploed.
Today, thousands of scientists work in those labs on unrelated research, developing pioneering technologies used for Mars exploration, chemotherapy, whole-body X-ray scanning at airports, high-speed computers and biotechnology.
Much of the old government energy lab empire is lost. Plans to turn them into park-like museums are just confirmations of that fact. “It’s really cool. It’s very nostalgic,” a visitor said. That’s about all you can say.
In June of this year, the Senate Energy and National Resources committee held a hearing on whether the energy labs ought not to return to working on energy. Ranking Member Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said:
“It is time for us to renew a coherent long-term approach to energy development, truly an all of the above approach. Innovation, of course, is absolutely at the core of that strategy. I think it is one of the few areas where the government can and should be providing greater funding and at the same time, I am aware if we do decide to spend more on energy innovation, we are going to have to make some very difficult choices about the amount of spending and the duration as well as what our priorities are for it.”
Maybe more government funding can bring them back to life. But some critics of the energy bureaucracy see these efforts as akin to trying to revive a corpse. The labs are said to be demoralized, mismanaged and perhaps even infiltrated by foreign spies. Maybe it’s better to start all over again. The decline of the labs became noticeable in the last decade of the 20th century. In 1994 the LA Times reported the cancellation of their mission as good news because now they could turn their talents away from evil, warlike efforts to something more politically correct.
A FUTURE WITHOUT BOMBS: Science Labs Searching for a New Mission.
Welcome as it is, the end of the Cold War has spelled bad news for the nation’s nuclear bomb designers and makers. Their highly skilled services are no longer in great demand. But they have a golden opportunity to prove, despite past failures, that it is possible to convert U.S. weapons brainpower to peacetime needs. It should not be lost.
The federally owned national labs are undergoing painful transitions, their budgets shrinking, their raison d’etre questioned. The labs are run by the Department of Defense, NASA and the Department of Energy. The conversion question is sharpest at the three energy labs that design and build nuclear weapons–Lawrence Livermore in California and Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico.
While they were busy looking for a new mission, they were kept employed by focusing on environmental cleanup.
The labs’ most obvious task is in cleaning up the environmental mess left by nuclear bomb production or testing in Colorado, Texas, Nevada and Washington state. Whatever they wind up doing, though, the labs face a difficult cultural change. Even as they try to be more open, secrecy remains an impediment to outside cooperation and many top scientists are handicapped, never having been able to publish. But the nation must not overlook the powerful resource represented by the labs. As Roger W. Werne, Livermore’s associate director for engineering and technology transfer, puts it, “People here passionately want to have a defined mission.” It is to the nation’s and California’s benefit to give them that.
But didn’t work out to the degree necessary to keep them focused. And now parts of that old energy lab empire are facing conversion to parks. At the time it seemed like an era of new beginnings. “Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary speaks of using them to enhance American economic competitiveness through “technology transfer.” It was admitted that there were going to be some problems.
These bureaucratic terms are easier to say than define. Reis talks of turning the labs to civilian tasks that complement military ones, using “core competencies” in computer, instrumentation and laser technology. For example, Livermore’s massive computational skills have proved useful to biological research on mapping the human genome. Livermore points to the work of Roger Aines and Robin Newmark, who use the lab’s expertise in high-temperature physics and underground imaging to clean up gasoline pollution of the water table. Sandia applies infrared technology to recycling plastic containers; Los Alamos has turned its powerful lasers to air pollution problems.
Nobody could foresee just how major these problems would be. It turned out the mission of recycling plastic containers wasn’t enough. But the question remains: will giving the labs more federal money bring them back to life? Or is it really better, as in the case of NASA, to take an entirely different approach, to start over? In the end it maybe best to leave the whole era in the past and to begin from first principles.
Belmont Commenters
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Back in the 80′s I was a program manager for a university based Engineering Research Center. My contracts were with DOD.
Government funded and directed research is grossly inefficient.
Why do we need more parks? We can’t afford what we have.
Sell to private industry to do as they will.
Maybe we should just designate all of our schools national parks, too.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html
Opinion
Is Algebra Necessary?
By ANDREW HACKER
Published: July 28, 2012
A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.
…
Hacker is defining the problem away. I was talking to a very high end engineer who claimed that in many respects what some schools graduate as engineers could never pass a test given to proper engineers a century ago. So while we may have many more “scientists” and STEM people on the books, there is an actual shortage of people who can do creative and demanding work. The worst of it is that we may be destroying aptitude in the school system.
There is something about the school system that causes performance to decline. Maybe Hacker’s article gives us a clue. He, “as a writer and a social scientist” thinks numeracy is an obstacle to education.
Math is an obstacle to graduation rates. Solution: get rid of it. This puts the cart before the horse. Graduation is supposed to be a sign of having learned something actual. It is not a credential everyone should be entitled to. Hacker goes on:
This is just plain perverse. But it’s a sign of an incentive structure that will doom generations of students. They’ll waste their lives in school learning nothing — or maybe media studies or gender history — and yet be told they are very smart. But when they graduate they’ll find themselves unfit for anything much and spend the rest of their lives wondering how this catastrophe befell them. One possible explanation is that we’re entering the 21st century with a school system run by 19th century union officials.
Maybe the school system, like the energy labs and NASA, is beyond incremental reform.
This is just another instance of where our ruling overlords from the Left wanting to relegate the notion of American Exceptionalism and the American Hegemon to a bit of quaint history. Make a park out of it and by the way re-write the history of the place to reflect a more politically correct view of how truly awful America is.
Charles Hill ,in a piece by Robert Pollock in the WSJ, argues that America became the great agent of Westphalian” liberal democracy” as he calls it, and in so doing created unheard advances in prosperity and human rights that are now withering away only to be replaced by the former world ruling unit of ruthless empires. From the article:
“So what makes our era unique and valuable? And how did we get here? To understand the road we’ve travelled, we have to go back—a long way.
The way the world through almost all of history has been ordered is through empires. The empire was the normal unit of rule. So it was the Chinese empire, the Mughal empire, the Persian empire, and the Roman empire, the Mayan empire.
What changed this was the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 17th century. “That was a war between the Holy Roman Empire and states, and states were new. …….
Our modern concept that war should be governed by law dates from the era. It also produced the Treaty of Westphalia. “What they did in creating something to prevent another Thirty Years War, they put in place what would develop into the international state system. . . .
My view is that every major modern war has been waged against this international system. That is, the empire strikes back. ”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577552821956795292.html
“It is time for us to renew a coherent long-term approach to energy development, truly an all of the above approach.”
This nation has lacked a coherent energy policy since I can recall. If you look at the bona fides of the likes of David Chu it would suggest that our nation has embarked on an institutionalized apology tour for the successes that marked our efforts to date.
But it is interesting to note that efforts in recent years have been to validate far left wing principles that suggest that any effort is futile because it would only sustain energy sufficiency for a decade or two. I recall a time in my youth when promulgating the panacea of ethanol production and I was cozying up to energy experts in the early 80′s a small NGO called Ecotope in Seattle that the need for energy would naturally be reduced. I was all but twenty and the ideals of ecological energy production appealed to me greatly. The concept was self-sufficiency, farming, photo-voltaic, and solar heating would obviate the need for more power. They insisted that the need for additional power generation would be totally unnecessary. It was an ecotopean ideal of course and did not foresee the advent of personal computers, big screen TV’s and electric cars. Their political banner was posted on billboards that pleaded; “Will the last person who leaves Seattle please turn out the Lights.” I argued they were wrong and energy was not a thing that would lesson with time and events have proven me correct. We needed more energy and needed to produce it more prolifically and more efficiently. But the Luddites prevailed.
Incidentally, around that time I dated the daughter of the former mayor of Livermore, a noted physicist at LLL and the University of California, Berkeley. (you can imagine the efforts to cleave me, a young, amorous dirt-bag away from their daughter). They introduced me to friends of the family, a Norwegian who was apparently was one of the top bomb experts at LLL. He had buried a box car in the front yard of the house and had a slide that would allow the family to “bug out” in place. At the time I saw it it had been converted to a dark room in which once of the sons had made a good living.
As far as the future of LLL is concerned. The way I see it is that these people, by and large, are extremely intelligent and useful for national projects. You could probably take the average nuclear weapon designer and set him loose on petroleum extraction (or anything for that matter) and they’d do quite well. But it would be the over the years that labs were taken over by government yes men to idle the brains of America. Maybe we should start over.
“Is Algebra Necessary?”
Hey Josh, can you write an expression without it? or are you not that kind of programmer.
We really need to first define our mission. After we define our mission, then we need to look at the means of accomplishing the mission. Certainly one of the means is NOT NASA. The old models have run their course of evolution. Actually, there are very exciting possibilities facing us. Making a park out of some old buildings is a typical govt idea, unimaginative and dumb.
Actually, the big issue is really government as it is run now. That is the overriding issue we have to face.
Every disaster is a new opportunity.
And the Senate, that hasn’t passed a budget in three years.
Don’t feed the Harry Reid.
W @ 3, Reading and understanding simple documents, writing simple declarative sentences and putting together equally simple verbal statements appear to be on the wain as well. Maybe everyone needs a portable tele-prompter installed in eyeglasses…oops, assumes ability to read.
damn
OK, I confess, my math skills are wanting but I am a terror with numerical methods on computer.
and I hasten to add, I learn advanced mathematics as an adult. I got behind early and stayed behind in my early education. ADD? Probably but it was not popular in my youth. By the time I had an intellectual awakening I entered puberty and that didn’t help much. When I calmed down it all started getting interesting. I would have eaten it up if they could have laid off the 18th century theory and focused on application. My parents learned Latin. I am not saying that it was a bad thing but it has little use in this modern age of change.
I think there is more than a little “Guild”ism in modern education.
Do we really need more museum parks? We already have one of the largest in captivity. It’s called General Motors. Government research money has produced many wonders in this museum park, not the least of which is the Chevy Volt.
The government must think us dolts
Will rush to buy the Chevy Volts
Whose range is listed as four city blocks
Whose ugliness makes people stare
And thieves won’t take them on a dare
So safe they are from theft they don’t need locks
With pols and unions hand in hand
They’ve quite destroyed the GM brand
Where once the Cadillac was term of choice
For excellence and top of line
But thanks to union led decline
The buying public chose to raise its voice
And cry No more, we’ve had enough
We will not buy your shoddy stuff
We won the war but Japs have won the race
Toyotas Hondas and the lot
Have left the GM stuff to rot
And where they once were first they’re now last place
So make a nice museum park
To go with all the labs to mark
The end of our pre-eminence at last
We don’t do math, we don’t build stuff
Androgynous instead of tough
A long time climbing up but downhill fast
Algebra as in 2x + 4= 8 is hard? Wow!
My belief is that we’ve been disinvesting in education (but not educators) since the early 70′s. If the IQ results of WW1 conscripts were measured correctly, then universal secondary education seems to add one to two standard deviations to IQs. Having an extremely education focused culture like the Confucian and Jewish seems to shift the mean IQ over another half to whole SD to the right.
We had tremendous success through about 1940 raising IQs and thereby productivity. By 1950, the education establishment was convinced that by applying new innovative educational techniques, that success could be repeated. Unfortunately, none of the new maths and readings budged the mean by so much as a hair. Based on nothing more than having been in school at the time, I feel that somewhere in the 70′s we started to give up. The governing class thinks that there are quite enough scientists and engineers anyway. Their attitude towards the research labs confirms this.
This is how the Romans stopped building roads and aqueducts and started writing neo-platonism.
5. Annoy Mouse
You would have hated me. Cars are for going fast. Any transportation benefit is incidental. Bombs are great. At least so long as the are falling on the enemy and not me.
Treehuggers need to be tied to the tree and left for the wildlife.
Charles, don’t they have property rights in Wisconsin? In Alabama and Arkansas if you can lure Bambi into your yard, you can shoot as many holes in them as you like. I’m pretty sure Tennessee, Mississippi are the same.
Back in the early 1990′s a promising USAF nuclear propulsion program, SNTP, was cancelled. The main reason it was done away with was that NASA fiercely protected that area of research as solely theirs – even when they had no program and, as it turned out, never would. So they conspired with some Congressmen to kill it. Meanwhile, some other congressmen figured out that SNTP was one of the very few programs that would prevent the old nuke infrastructure form being shut down, and ordered the USAF to spend an extra $20M on a program that was to be cancelled the following year – and compounded the nonsense by directing the DoD to “find the extra money somewhere” – not wishing to fight the political battles associated with taking it away from other favored programs.
In the mid-1990′s the USAF formally drew up plans to destroy most of the facilities on Cape Canaveral and turn most of the place into a park. Base beautification was a top priority in AF Space Command, and the cheapest and easiest way to make the place pretty was to tear down all that ugly old space stuff.
Getting rid of math is stupid – but we do need to get rid of most college math teachers. None of them ever seemed to know why they were teaching the stuff, other than that they had a degree in it and were paid to do so. “What’s it good for?” they would say, “Well, all I know is that you can get paid to teach it.” Have the engineers teach math; they’ll throw out what they don’t need.
It took 8 generations to build the capital base of American wealth and power. It took two generations to destroy it. Laboratories, an educational system, the world’s best health care, an unbeatable military with redundant and flexible tactical and strategic systems that no one would dare challenge, a network of bases worth billions and able to support a mobilization on demand. All pissed away. Go to the Presidio in San Francisco or NY’s Governors Island and ask what children abandoned these and how will the gods punish them?
General Groves led the Manhattan Project, after completing the Pentagon just in time for WWII. Apparently, he insisted that buildings at the converted boys school at Los Alamos be temporary. His plan was to close the lab once the war was won.
Instead, here we are 65 years later, and Los Alamos National Laboratory is still there. The power of inertia — or maybe a side effect of government once having had a very capacious financial design margin?
Maybe the biggest issue is that the good guys have not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992. 20 years is a long time relative to the half life of tritium. Do we know for sure that there even is a workable nuclear deterrent anymore? How many more years before an Iran or a North Korea decides it is worth taking the risk that the feckless West will have no confidence in its own weapons, and will back down without a fight?
Perhaps the long-term safety of the human race demands that the US gets back to having a real nuclear weapons program, including weapons-focused national laboratories. But that can’t happen until the Internal Enemy — Subotai’s TWANLOC — have been extirpated from the public square.
Yep, that’s totally logical. It can’t be because our curricula or methods of instruction suck, it must be the lousy quality of our students. We’ve already done away with writing, so lets eliminate reading and arithmetic, too. It should help for another generation and then, when that’s not enough, we can eliminate other stuff. We should end up fine with only advance recess and lunch 101. But we will need to study it further, and that will take extra money.
I also wonder just what you do when you visit a radioactive national park, line up for the free x-rays? Take home a stuffed two-headed squirrel? Make a campfire and boil water over a handful of rocks?
–
But about our boy Hacker, mebbe he’s right?
It may just be that only x% of the population really can learn much math, and x is less than 100. Obviously it would be better to dismantle western society than to embarass the 5% or so who can’t figure out how to accurately make change for a dollar, … since we now have one of those as president of the united states. Bunch of dead white men invented that math stuff anyhow, and they weren’t even Americans.
Aw hell, I was going to try a real argument about trying to overeducate everyone, but it just keeps falling apart. We all know it just inverts and turns into giving everyone PhDs in being their own best friends anyway. Never mind.
am @ 5: Hey Josh, can you write an expression without it?
Yes. A mathematical expression is just a series of symbols, it need not include variables or unknowns, and programmatic variables may not be exactly the same thing as algebraic variables anyway. OTOH, Quine said, “To be, is to be the value of a variable” so maybe it’s the English Lit majors who need the stuff.
Andrew Hacker wants to ban anything that is difficult to learn about, eh? What would women say to that? Dangerous ground there Hacker.
It’s that old nihilism again. When nothing matters, why bother making an effort to learn or to do anything? The Hackers of this world will end up wandering the Earth as illiterate, innumerate, ignorant and incompetent lotus eaters.
Those who bitterly cling to learning and doing difficult things might hire the odd lotus eater to sweep the porch.
We as a society are evolving into a two tier structure. Those that enjoy using their mind and those that watch reality shows. This isn’t so different from Medieval Society with lords and serfs. What ended Medieval society was the advent of a middle class. I think that accounts for the current assault on the middle class. Socialists want a lower class of drones, serfs, what ever and an upper class of them.
I might think this because I’m paranoid. Then again am I paranoid enough?
Trouble for the Lords all ways comes from the middle class. The serfs don’t have the time energy or knowledge to revolt. It is the middle class that creates the revolutions.
Celer, Silens, Mortalis.
More rigor in basic Math for all, then different requirements as students are sorted out based on aptitudes and desire is in order, I think:
At Beserkley, we had Calculus for Math, Science, and Engineering Majors, and some other Calculus Class for pre-med students and others that I do not recall.
Same for upper division Organic Chem, and no doubt some others I was not aware of not in my fields. (Chemical Engineering first, then BioChem)
Why not have similar separate tracks in high school?
—
“Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.
Nor is it clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required.
Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It works with a nearby community college, which has tailored classes in “machine tool mathematics.”
That sort of collaboration has long undergirded German apprenticeship programs. I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic. ”
(From #2, Josh’s cite)
—
In an ideal World, we’d all be as enlightened as Governor Jerry Brown:
His thinking seems little changed from the window into his psyche he offered in the 1975 commencement at the University of Santa Clara – the Jesuit school he had attended for a year before joining the seminary. In part of that speech, Brown reached back to the Father Teilhard de Chardin who, he said:
“…saw that there was an evolution of the mind as well as the body. The evolution of the spirit was bringing the divergence of this planet together, not only the nuclear problems, the problem of learning to live with people who are very different, the problem of one generation accepting the different lifestyle, of accepting one another.
I think we can very well think of the philosophy that all diversity is being converged toward a greater unit.
That’s the way I see things and it won’t be done unless each one of us can do this for ourselves so that together we can do what none of us can do separately.”
Brown’s first guru was not Baba Ram Dass, who published “Be Here Now” in 1971, but his forerunner — Ignatius — who told Jerry and all the other would-be keepers of the flame and sword from the 16th Century onward:
“Age quod agis” –
“Do what you are doing.”
14. Blast From the Past
It took 8 generations to build the capital base of American wealth and power. It took two generations to destroy it. Laboratories, an educational system, the world’s best health care, an unbeatable military with redundant and flexible tactical and strategic systems that no one would dare challenge, a network of bases worth billions and able to support a mobilization on demand. All pissed away. Go to the Presidio in San Francisco or NY’s Governors Island and ask what children abandoned these and how will the gods punish them?
………….
I was born at the Presidio in Letterman General Hospital after my dad came back from the Korean War;
http://www.citybirds.com/DigitalPhotos19/Letterman02.html
http://www.presidio.gov/explore/Pages/letterman-district.aspx
I was there in April this year. Some of the old army buildings are still on the base. Letterman itself has been torn down and replaced in 2005 by a two or three story digital arts building own by Lucas Films. There’s a statue of Yoda out front.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QuEshtumuQ
The basic blocking and tackling of any civilization involves getting ever cheaper water and energy. The US gave up on this project during the 1970′s ((when dam building ended and oil prices rose–while thorium reactors and desalination membrane research was abandoned along with the moon project.) The US labs have begun to reengage in Energy and water research in the last 10 years in a groping but earnest manner. Bill Gates has said the USA needs to spend 12 billion a year more on energy research. (I think a significant portion of that should go to water research.) Most of the DOE budget goes to legacy nuclear issues.)
What will make the USA and through the USA the rest of the earth experience a successful 21st century
The capital base for the USA will be restored in two generations by collapsing the cost of electricity with thorium reactors developed and prototyped at Oak Ridge Laboratories under the direction of Alvin Weinberg. A working model ran from 1966-70. In turn cheap electricity will enable the USA to cheaply tap the green river formation oil shale in southwestern Wyoming and produce oil for under 20@barrel and turning the USA into an oil exporter. As well as recapitalizing the USA cheap oil will defund the gulf Arabs…leaving them little money to fund the radical madrases in Pakistan and elsewhere.
imho the national labs should be re purposed to continuously collapsed the cost of water–(especially desalination right) and energy.
A complete discussion of this can be found in this ebook I published
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3PdgFAy4_0&feature=related
Josh, that is for you. Or anybody that has a hula hoop in their garage.
I’ve been arguing for decades math should only be taught to those that enjoy it. Those that dread math class are better off being taught to use a calculator.
The standard response I got was, what if you can’t get batteries? My standard response to that was if society has collapsed to the point where you cannot get batteries, you don’t need to know math, you need to know how to make your own bow and arrows.
Haji can’t shoot.
Charles @ 21: “… collapsing the cost of electricity with thorium reactors developed and prototyped at Oak Ridge Laboratories under the direction of Alvin Weinberg. A working model ran from 1966-70.”
That’s over 40 years ago — two human generations. What halted progress after 1970 was the rise of the Regulatory State and the tidal wave of litigation it encouraged. Rich progressives choked the Golden Goose, sending jobs & tax revenues overseas.
Re-purposing the national labs will not change any of that. Politics trumps technology. We need to fix the politics first. It may be that today’s “Peak Government” will provide us with the only opportunity the human race will ever get to discredit forever the Political Class and get back to creating a world of plenty for everyone.
As a side note — I have great sympathy for your objectives. But rather than re-purposing government-run labs, it would be better for politicians to concentrate on rolling back regulations and tax regimes which stifle innovation. They should also look into “X-Prizes” — big rewards for the first inventor, university, commercial lab which reaches certain defined goals (such as ultra-cheap water desalination) without specifying the technology to be used.
The problem with algebra is that the efficiency experts think the abilty to create an expression of utilization in time is more important than the actual productive result. When capital is spent on an item that is used 50% of the time, but creates an increase of 85% greater output from a system, these experts will tell you the item is underutilized, so dispose of it and forego the increase in real world results. Before government involement, there were people building radios and telegraphs and railroads. In many cases, the electric power company is a ‘regulated’ private company. Hospitals were owned by the doctors involved and others that cared. Government is not the driving force, it is the limiting force, because of the need to control others. Do not worry about education, the kids that want to learn will do so despite the educators. Of my children, one is a learner, the others care not. All are successful in their lifes.
Oops!
What’s that you say? The little darlings can’t do math, read or write? The solution is elementary! Simply use the internet to hire folks in India or some other low wage furrin place to do it for them! That way the darlings get the grade and the degree without having to stress their wonderful little noggins and can use their creativity for really kewel stuff like drugs and sex. It’s a win-win for everybody.
Doug @20,
Chemical Engineering first, then BioChem
When were you at Berkeley? You may have been one of my students.
As a grad student, I was employed through the Lawrence Berkeley Lab (now LBNL), so I have some sympathy for them. The national labs were established to deliver nuclear weapons. Some still tend to this — Livermore and Sandia, for example — and some characterize nuclear materials and their sourcing from around the world (Oak Ridge) but by and large they have outlived their usefulness.
Keep the core for the weapons, and dump the rest. They serve no purpose any longer.
Charles: being a species of wet blanket I don’t kindle. Is there a way I can buy the ebook as a .pdf?
Mr. Hacker’s circular logic reveals the heavy imprint of the Perverse Progressive Principles applied to his education. He refuses to consider why children with the best attention-deficit drugs school boards have ever had available to cram down the throats of their restive charges – children who enjoy the best nutrition stolen from all the third world nations – NONETHELESS can’t be cajoled into showing the slightest interest in math. Instead he falls back to the standard whinging Liberal grouse, that the subject is so difficult, it’s unfair to force kids to even attempt it. “Let the computers get on with the addin’ up; We’ll take care of the Eternal Verities, thank you very much…” *
No matter that 99 percent of College graduates emerge from sixteen years of schooling knowing substantially less about math than had been worked out by the minds of the 17th century… (Sorry, was that politically incorrect to use a scary “percentage” term?)
======================
* from the confrontation between “working thinkers” and the committee poised to turn on and question the great computer Deep Thought, in Douglas Adams story “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.”
23. Kinuachdrach
Charles @ 21: “… collapsing the cost of electricity with thorium reactors developed and prototyped at Oak Ridge Laboratories under the direction of Alvin Weinberg. A working model ran from 1966-70.”
That’s over 40 years ago — two human generations. What halted progress after 1970 was the rise of the Regulatory State and the tidal wave of litigation it encouraged. Rich progressives choked the Golden Goose, sending jobs & tax revenues overseas.
…………..
No that’s not what did it. There were a number of reasons for the thorium reactors being shut down including an ultimately failed effort to push limited resources into a breeder reactor. But the biggest reason was that the military wanted dual use reactors. That is reactors that in a pinch could create nuclear weapons. Light water reactors can do that. Thorium reactors cannot. the 60′s and 70′s were the height of the cold war.
The algebra issue is something i can speak to for an entire thread myself, but to stay on topic:
–Today, thousands of scientists work in those labs on unrelated research, developing pioneering technologies used for Mars exploration, chemotherapy, whole-body X-ray scanning at airports, high-speed computers and biotechnology.
I was a summer student in CS research (quantum computing) at LANL less than 15 years ago. I entered with the same dumb notion that no one at the lab had a vision or mission, since they did science in such seemingly unrelated problems. But then I visited the museum, and it dawned on me what a moron I was.
It was such an epiphany to me to realize that every single bizarre science project there was a necessary piece of the puzzle to save us from nuclear war or to make nuclear weapons viable.
Why were they interested in millimeter wave “see through wall” technology that would come to be used by, say, TSA? Because you need to investigate an ex nuclear weapons site safely, and in the event of physical collapse or terrorist attack, you need to know how to get in, out, and to people without getting yourself contaminated. Why were they inventors of impressive meterological models? because you need to model how the wind will blow after a nuclear attack or accident to model contamination. supercomputers? because you can’t test nukes anymore, you have to simulate the tests, and need to compute where all of the particles are going to go. every atom, every piece of casing, every fuel element, every bolt. Why were they interested in the crystallization properties of ceramics ? Because they needed to invent materials that could lock up radioactive sources so as to never contaminate drinking water, not in 10000 years.
So when the idiots above say this stuff is unrelated, it’s because the journalists, politicians, and administrators can’t even bloody fathom what nuclear weapons were and are, and can’t listen to their staff explain it to them. But sadly, those staff who could explain are dead or retired.
What was so awful after my realization was the next one: most of the other grad students there never had the epiphany, and neither did their professors. In fact, less than 1/5 of the grad students I met there were natural born US citizens. of them, not one other than myself believed communism was outright evil. less than half of the professors I met were natural born US citizens, and I don’t think the ethnic foreigners were naturalized.
Most of them did not believe in the mission of the US. I mean that they didn’t see why the US was special, why defending her from other countries was anything but an anachronism. They didn’t believe in secrets, either, which was why the chinese were always capable of stealing stuff (like the w88 miniaturization plans). now, this is not surprising. western scientists have historically been incapable of seeing national loyalty as an important value. they value the scientific truth and camaraderie. but LANL used to have enough other Americans in leadership there to keep the bulk of scientists insulated, and the rest had come from places where they knew the evil outside the US.
the labs lack a mission because the country does. our elites’ mission is not in line with the defense of America. we’ve mined this topic before, but this is another example.
23. Kinuachdrach
CRe-purposing the national labs will not change any of that. Politics trumps technology. We need to fix the politics first. It may be that today’s “Peak Government” will provide us with the only opportunity the human race will ever get to discredit forever the Political Class and get back to creating a world of plenty for everyone.
As a side note — I have great sympathy for your objectives. But rather than re-purposing government-run labs, it would be better for politicians to concentrate on rolling back regulations and tax regimes which stifle innovation. They should also look into “X-Prizes” — big rewards for the first inventor, university, commercial lab which reaches certain defined goals (such as ultra-cheap water desalination) without specifying the technology to be used.
……………
Agree with this. Prizes are a great way to tap the unknown unknowns. As well, they yield ten times the amount of R&D as directed research.
28. Tamquam
You can download a kindle reader to your desktop at.
http://amzn.to/qxSmNO
c @ 21: imho the national labs should be re purposed to continuously collapsed the cost of water–(especially desalination right) and energy.
Yes. The funny thing is, Obambus coulda been a hero if he embraced that instead of Solyndra, and why didn’t he? Has not the faintest iota of knowledge of his own about this stuff, and came to depend on idiots like Chu who, PhD or not, seem not much better off.
(for that matter I think it’s a huge lost opportunity that DUBYA didn’t embrace this stuff on a priority basis in 2002)
I’d add to this another goal, which is to reduce the cost of getting a pound to orbit by 90%. Mass drivers, sky hooks, 100-mile towers, balloons, lasers, masers, grasers, phasers, whatever. Side effect is bound to be some excellent weapons, too.
But here’s the problem, we’re now in the habit of paying our researchers basically zero, and outsourcing it all to our Indian and Chinese visa holders. So we’re gonna have to say, US citizens ONLY, and maybe even BORN US citizens, and double or triple the current pay rate for techies, or it ain’t gonna work anyway. And what are the odds of that getting through Congress?
But sure, if you want to have a national park, how about a WORKING national science park? I used to walk past the linear accelerator on campus, and always stop to look in and see if there was any Bruce Banner business going on down there.
s @ 22: Josh, that is for you. Or anybody that has a hula hoop in their garage.
Thanks. That’s either a great example of what you can do with a BS in Physics from MIT, or exactly the opposite.
c @ 32: Agree with this. Prizes are a great way to tap the unknown unknowns. As well, they yield ten times the amount of R&D as directed research.
I dunno, what’s your example of this working, Rhutan’s space shot? I’m entirely unimpressed with that. Loebner prize? No results in twenty years. Nobody even offered a prize for chess, yet that was done. Nor for most insipid idea, yet we now have social networking.
Salman Khan makes a telling observation here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C7FH7El35w&t=2034s
(“it’s not rocket science” – yet the PhD’s in the room weren’t facile w/ the basics (!?).. they clearly got thru school with a “C” level of Algebra comprehension, likely graded as a “B”).
Without the ability to challenge authority on the basics – much of which is simple algebra and statistics, we’re sheeple. Led around by the nose by shamans and worse.
Most press hype of some anxiety (like Alar, AGW, radiation of all kinds, FDA dicta, soldiers’ suicides (that are far less than psychiatrists’), and arguably real problems, like prolonged dioxin exposure) cannot be translated to risk by the average citizen – i.e. “is the risk to me of what is being hyped more or less likely than death from a plane falling on my head?” (which is maybe ~6 deaths a year). But then that level of full disclosure in simple language wouldn’t sell newspapers. And calculating “lost opportunity” costs (of any additional regulation or tax in response to the anxiety) would be far too “conservative” (if not freedom and individual responsibility enhancing) and discourage our betters attempting to do-good and improve us sheeple.
As Khan says the U.S. would be a different country if we were as concerned about numeracy as we used to be (until we gave up) about literacy. He holds out hope that this can be fixed – irrespective of how broke our government schools are – and even the lowest ability student can absorb the concepts and demonstrate “A” level competence through Algebra 1. Granted, given how the rest-of-the-world is advancing, the fact the U.S. has little left than dunces (including the PhDs he references who fail at demonstrating even limited algebraic competence) isn’t going to hold back mankind.
This is a very sobering talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
So if a (2nd generation and beyond U.S.) student isn’t this desperate for an education, why should we waste our taxpayer dollars on them when there are all these other clearly motivated and hungry minds that, when educated, will see us to a better future? Should U.S. privilege be a birthright?
Josh @ 34: “I dunno, what’s your example of this [X-Prize] working”
Josh, I am shocked! You are a person of obvious erudition — as well as great perception. Surely you remember …
The classic successful “X-Prize” happened back in the 1700s, when the British Admiralty offered a substantial prize for the first person able to build a timepiece accurate enough to be used in navigation. Unknown John Harrison came out of left field to win it, beating all the big names of the day with new technology. Then the Brits — ever-perfidious Albion! — tried to stiff him out of the prize. Perhaps the Political Class has always & everywhere been worthless?
Dava Sobel wrote a highly popular (though not that informative) book about this — “Longitude”.
45% of this world is happy to sit and play dice all day, another 45% being women who cook. Only a few madmen are determined to arm themselves with nuclear weaponry and enslave their fellow men with media devices full of lies — two goals which the government calls “education”.
18. stevesmith – Andrew Hacker wants to ban anything that is difficult to learn about, eh?
The idea is not to waste time having folks master tools they don’t need. Poets don’t need shop class and the latter shouldn’t need poetry lessons (except to appreciate Christ’s suffering in either example). Very few people need higher math for anything… Nobody needs psychology except for psychologists, if only they knew that.
21. Charles – The basic blocking and tackling of any civilization involves getting ever cheaper water and energy.
What good is more energy? If nations aren’t fighting for oil and metals, then it will be some other limited resource.
A world that is only driven to build higher skyscrapers or to colonize outer space won’t last — and don’t think the mads aren’t gleeful about it. Naturally we are happy to extended our lifespans with medicine, but then only to raise the retirement age. Google suggests people wear headgear so they can work faster mapping government roads to nowhere. Apple wants an iPhone marking our palms, so we may buy and sell their products more quickly. These plans are satanic. They are more devastating to us humans than the atom bomb.
24 @TomW
You sound like you might be a veteran of the Kaizen Wars. I recognize that cant and the associated dialects now that I’ve seen it put into action in a working factory. As to whether the factory is still working is a story I will leave for another day…
I’d argue that poets wouldn’t be poorly served by a shop class or two. Think Virgil, Shakespeare, Robert Frost. These guys knew how to mend a fence, literally. It showed and it gave power to their poetry, figuratively. This was some masculine power, too, these guys aren’t confused with the lily-totin’, simpering Romantics. The idea that we ought to deepsix algebra is amazing to behold. To offer ‘civic statistics’ as a replacement is a howler that reveals how little Dr. Hacker does know about the subject. How are you going to get to statistics unarmed with algebra? How are you ever going to solve for x without algebra? Algebra is basic, foundational, elemental, to anything beyond arithmetic including geometry, accounting, finance, business planning, the list goes on. It even includes, as some have said here, building a fence (or even buying the correct board-feet of lumber to get started).
Our dear professor is a political scientist, one seemingly interested in polls and one who did emphasize the importance of scientific studies. How in the world are these to be done, or even ‘augured’, sans algebra?
The idea is so daft it boggles the mind. Here’s the real problem: it’s too dang boring! Not enough social justice mojo or lifestyle experimentation in those maddening multistep equations in one variable! But is algebra the real culprit? What if our heroic professor looks deeper into the problem until he discovers that the real heart of it all is in testing and grading. You want to talk impediments of academic progress, what about tests and grades? What could be more open to abuse, caprice, and elements of cultural and gender bias? Why, I bet far more students would graduate if we’d just hand them diplomas. In fact, failure to do so admits a certain fascistic, patriarchal, backward 19th century proclivity which no doubts stands contrary to say, today’s Chicago or Boston values.
Math/science intelligence is intelligence. Practical mechanical ability is intelligence. The rest is philosophizing and BS.
What the hell are kids who flunked math or didn’t take it in high school doing applying to college anyways? Their parents and guidance counselors are letting them down. The colleges should mail back their applications and fees summarily and tell the kids to reapply when their math grades justify it. Or they should go another way in life.
The truth is, degrees in the humanities/social “sciences” aren’t that hard to get. I get tired of education or humanities majors who are devoid of any real math or statistics skills preening about their “degrees” which a chimp could have gotten. They may be well spoken, good people and they may be good at being moms or at some specific task for which they were hired at some government job, but the math skill stuff separates, in the end.
When I started in the chemistry track at a top school not too many decades ago, by the end of the four basic semesters almost 70% of ostensibly “smart” people couldn’t do the work, from lack of brains, lack of work ethic, or both, and dropped out to become psychology majors etc. I don’t imagine kids are magically more intelligent now.
When I left for college from a highly ranked small town public high school 30 years ago only about 45% of my class actually even matriculated at a two or four year college, and a good chunk of these didn’t graduate with four year degrees. That “only” 58% are graduating from one now in the era of grade inflation, incompetent professors, and matchbook cover degrees, is not surprising and I can’t imagine whence cometh the “chagrin”. Also, I’d be willing to bet a lot of those degrees that actually are accomplished are in BS fields which do nothing to enhance either the employment chances of the graduate nor his ability to understand the world and our civilization.
I work in a government research lab. Not a famous one, in fact a rather small and boring one. That’s not to say this lab doesn’t have laurels and has not made significant contributions, it has. But it’s also true this lab hasn’t done anything big in a while and some would say its salad days are behind it. One factor is the mission change that happened after the Soviet Union went tango uniform, no doubt. This is a symptom of a high-level leadership vacuum, a lack of the vision that tasks and coordinates the laboratories. Inter-laboratory coordination between the disparate labs seems very lacking. What’s emerged is that each lab is fiefdom competing against the others in the wake. While an element of that was always there, it used to not be so bad. Years ago we used to do a number of joint projects with other labs. A second factor is that a couple of the central missions given us since have proved to be well nigh impossible to deliver upon as hoped. A third factor is the strangulation of red tape.
I’ve always considered that the lab could be doing much better were it given a clearer mission, a succinct problem statement on which to focus. As it is, we are blown hither and thither by the prevailing winds of fad. Yes, fad. Science is quite faddish, and there’s always a hot new buzzword coming down on us.
Wretchard @3
I think it’s crazy to require every high school student to take algebra, as some school districts are now doing or proposing to do; some students just don’t have the aptitude. OTOH, I think an important reason why so many students flunk algebra and other “higher” math is that they underestimate the effort required. They think that just sort of understanding the material should be enough. That doesn’t work when it comes to exams. It may work with some other subjects, but not math.
I think Hacker is an idiot.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn math and in the process have come to the conclusion based on my own anecdotal evidence that of the problems in teaching it the biggest is not starting it soon enough and intensely enough in schools. Another problem is the cliche “Learning is supposed to be fun!” Like hell, there is always something you need to know sooner or later that is going to require work and if it was fun learning it they wouldn’t call it work. There have always been gripes about the one size fits all teaching methods of the mass production theories of public education. In some Khan Academy studies they found that a lot of students that initially lagged in learning math would after a period of struggle and hard work would hit a point where they would accelerate and then surpass students who had a linear increase in math skills.
For a Sunday Supplement mish mash of the current studies on how learning works by the increase of the thickness of the myelin sheath around nerves that get a lot of use and therefore increases the nerves speed and “bandwidth” there is a book that is available as an Ebook from a lot of libraries. It is called “The Talent Code:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Talent-Code-Greatness-Grown/dp/055380684X?tag=duckduckgo-d-20
Sometimes there isn’t much to add in the way of commentary. The story is basically its own comment. Things are happening exactly as they should.
It was inevitable that these national laboratories would relax from being the focused instruments of war, in order to repurpose themselves for trendy but ultimately vainglorious humanitarian concerns, before being shuttered altogether; for in this they simply followed the course of the larger culture and “acted out” the history of that culture as its body-constituents.
What, if anything, should be done about this? Probably nothing at all, for the same story is repeating itself all across the fruited plain. In every aspect of American life the old structures are visibly in decline. The passing of the age has come upon us and, like it or not, our new destiny will be forged in battles not yet joined and decisions not yet made.
There is nothing to regret about this. Or if there is, let the regret be wistful and only momentary. In fact there are many things about the post-war era I shall not be sad to part with, which is not to say that I don’t weep for the immense personal suffering which is likely to attend its passing. All we can do is endure it, for it cannot be prevented. There is in such times the opportunity for some of us to live a richer, harder, more heroic sort of life than what we had before.
When altering the course of an orbit thrust is most profitably exerted at the perigee, the culmination of the precipitous plunge toward the abyss.
AM @ 5 says “This nation has lacked a coherent energy policy since I can recall. ”
It has lacked a coherent energy since the Department of Energy was originally created. As I recall, the DOE was created in the 70′s in response to the creation of OPEC and the insane fuel shortages. Its original mandate was to wean the U.S.off its dependence on foreign oil. Well…… we can see how great that’s worked out.
No great enlightening comment from me. At one time I did a lot of remote sensing research under NASA funding and then with several private companies. My experience with NASA says it needs to be shut down and reconstituted without the overriding political focus.
The two best things we can do is to deunionize the complete culture; pay for performance at all cost and grade hard, teacher and pupil. Everyone needs to know that if they don’t perform to the VERY best of their abilities they might starve and then provide a needs/means tested minimal safety net.
Second somehow completley sweep the leftist and centerist politicans of all stripes from public life. This is not easy and I can’t even imagine how. Maybe a catastrophic financial disaster like the Weimer Republic did to Germany. Only that is sort of like destroying the village to same it. Whatever, we are adrift and the politicans are exploiting the drift to strangle us with regulation.
I am so tired of constantly fighting the Lefties. This has been going on since 1964 when the world went insane with the first College occupations at Berkley and Columbia and I just want them to dissapear.
Algebra is basically a form of pattern recognition. How you learn to do it correctly is by drilling. The teacher explains a few examples, then the students work on some. Then they do about 30 more examples for homework. Then they review those in class and then do some more. And hey magic! now they know how to do it and can move to the next type of equation.
Pedagogically, however, we are no longer allowed to drill. Too boring. Too tedious. Every math question has to be turned into a little drama of social engineering. So even those with aptitude for math are failed by the education establishment.
The other reason for the downward trend is racial, a subject of course nobody will touch. Black and brown children have significantly lower ability for math, period, to say nothing of their poisonous attitudes towards education. Asians have higher ability, to say nothing of their positive attitudes towards education.
This is all old news and common sense, yet we continue right along with our fantasies that if white people are just nice enough to Hispanics and blacks, then math geniuses will bloom among them like springtime flowers. The level of delusion among white Liberals is always astonishing, no matter how often you see it.
We should give up on math. I live in a state that believes it can pass a law to say henceforth 25% of our electricity shall come from wind farms and solar farms, and at the same time making it impossible to actually find a space to build all these wind farms. Not to mention the embarrassment that the voters don’t have any idea how many kwh the state needs and what the best capacity they can expect from a windfarm is even on a good day.
peterike@47
Agreed. Which mathematician said “In math, we don’t understand things, we just get used to them.”?
One block to learning algebra is poor arithmetic skills. If it takes a student too long to multiply two one-digit numbers, they don’t recognize the pattern. Back to drilling.
A few years ago, I heard my old school had added a 5th year of math. I asked the principal how many students took it, and he said about 30. That’s half the graduating class. I suspect it’s dumbed-down to avoid “wasting” a full teacher’s hour on 6-10 students.
“Higher Education” is a wonderful example of why liberals, progressives or what ever label you assign this brainwashed (by our completely unnecessary, redundant, destructive Educational Department) group of American government parasites. And I use the term American loosely and reluctantly, Because why no matter what truths, examples, wisdom or even facts known and acknowledged…will not be accepted, acknowledged or believed at all by those brainwashed by decades of WRONG Socialist, Marxist, empty, destructive teachings.
But all of this is AMERICAN’S fault for generations. We have allowed our education system to be slowly highjacked, stolen, corrupted and used against America and freedom for the last several decades. OUR FAULT. Why, you ask? because we stepped back from the maintenance and ultimate responsibility that we all were assigned by our Founders and their vision of America. Of course we also made the dollar our God and savior, to our everlasting shame and demise.
WE should all be ashamed of our Parents, Grand Parents Great Grand Parents and of course OURSELVES.
But…maybe and hopefully – now that we see and feel how our Republic is trembling and teetering on the brink of her destruction, WE will awake and stand up and step forward to the line and defend her and wipe out her enemies within.
God Bless America and give us the numbers and strength to win.
For those we love, our family and our friends and our generations to come.
Papa Ray
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
2009 Judge Alex Kozinski
47 peterike:
Black and brown children have significantly lower ability for math, period,
I cannot argue statistics on this statement, but suggest you use google and search for “Stand and Deliver”. The story may have been ‘optimized’ for the big screen, but nonetheless, Jaime Escalante did have an effect.
Stand and Deliver
Personally, I think raised expectations and demand for performance are good things in education. If everybody wins a prize for ‘showing up’, then the best you can expect is just that. The ‘students’ are deprived for the remainder of their life, and the number of lost person-years in that remainder is incalculable compared to the lost person-years spent in higher un-education under the current system.
IMO, students put some of their Constitutional rights on suspension while in the educational arena, as their right to speak deprives others of their right to learn. Mis-behave? Go sit in the hallway.
The DOE is as was described by Milton Friedman:
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in
5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.” — Milton Friedman.
tomw
I am with “Smoking Frog” (#42), algebra was a College course back when College’s really taught a “Higher” education… That’s when college’s grad’s gave us the Atom Bomb, sent people to the Moon and back! Now we teach algebra in High school and we end up closing down our space missions… go figure. College Academia is the refuge of Progressivism and the fortress of Liberalism, the engine of Anti-Americanism! Until we get rid of the “Advanced” learning in our public schools and go back to the fundamentals that made America great for the first 150 years we will remain in the death spiral, the end can’t be to many generations ahead.
48. john – spot on! With a quick Google and a little arithmetic the average person discovers that there isn’t enough dry land on the surface of the Earth for wind farms to generate what the US produces from coal alone. Yet this basic fact goes right over the heads of greenies touting wind as a solution.
There are so many areas where our educational systems lets us down – math is just one. Our society still values the bulging bicep more than the bulging cranium and the US educational system will continue at it’s 3rd world level until those values change. Just look at the print space devoted to prep athletics versus academics.
Peggy Noonan was on the Laura Ingraham show this morning and Laura asked her to sum up the Olympics in one sentence. I paraphrase: “If there’s one thing you can say about the opening ceremony at the London Olympics and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, it is that the Chinese like China.”
Next question: “What would you say about the brouhaha concerning the American uniforms?”
(This is really an estimation of the quote) “They struck me as what one would expect of the Martian Team at their first Earth Olympics.”
While both were fairly humorous responses, the first struck me as an incredibly prescient observation. With the left’s clear goal of taking over academia and the Media and despite the confusion that much of those tactics have had on the people’s conscience, they appear to be quite successful. But successful to what end? If the goal was to gain power over the American people – every aspect of their lives by some chaotic “Clockwork Orange” game plan that creates self-doubt and an inward hatred of the majority of its citizens, then what have they truly gained? A country that has lost its self-confidence is not much good to itself, except to wallow in self-pity. Where to now?
Isn’t it clear to them once they gain control with a clearly demoralized populace, that in this world, someone will soon come to take it from them? Are they not aware that when that happens they will be the first “removed?” I don’t know…I don’t understand the concept of suicide bombers either. Perhaps there’s an inverse correlation…
Someone might argue that most tyrannies are pretty strong militarily and that America is to date, the most powerful of all! Just look at Nazi Germany which was the best example of a Super Power of their time. But there is a huge difference between 1939 Germany and 2012 America. Just one aspect: the Germans believed themselves “Supermen” and national “projects” worked with industrial and administrative precision. The left for the last 40 years has told us that we suck, and once many of the people believed that lie, those folks quit trying and accepted their true worth as government chattel. Many now seem to be demonstrating just that reality.
Is belief that “we suck” indicative in what America does or is today? I’m not a follower of Michael Phelps, but his performance in the Olympics as we speak is indicative to me of an athlete who “took for granted” his past athletic achievements. Clearly, in the time between Olympics, he lost his desire and appeared to drop out; the post-Olympic picture of him with the Bong pipe seemed to characterize his new attitude. Well, he’s worked hard the last year or two, so perhaps he will regain his previous form, but from my view, like our country of late, he seems to have frittered away his previously earned design margin.
That has been a recurring fear on this board – that America is doing the same – squandering our design margin. I for one, am very worried, that like Michael Phelps, there may be no Gold Medals in our future, unless we “change” our current “hope” this November.
I separate from the school here. Maybe because I’m a rustic. Some humans are not meant to be ‘brains’. God in his wisdom, has made us all different. Society needs 3rd basemen and delivery drivers as much as Scientists. IMHO trying to force Middle linebackers to learn calculus is foolish. As a rustic, I would compare that to trying to milk a horse. Even when it works, you are not happy with the results. Those that lack a love for math should be taught to use a calculator.
How many of you know how your cell phone works? I would guess about about 3/4 of the clubbers do. How many could build a cell phone, given the proper parts? !/4 or less.
Anybody can use a cell phone. That is because cell phones were created by smart, talented people to be used by power forwards;
http://cellphones.org/cell-phone-history.html
A controversial article. Here is a more PC link;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones
Among the general population, I would guess less then 10% could describe the physics behind the cell phone. Maybe much less.
ALL Mathematics courses should be optional. Teach ‘em how to use the calculator. Those that are curious about how the calculator gets it’s answer can be directed to Math101.
Those that are more concerned with ‘Dancing with the Stars’ don’t care and cannot be taught to care. Yet society still needs them. If necessary, the cash register can be programmed to tell them that 57 cents change is 2 quarters, a nickel and 2 pennies.
People with serious talent do not need math;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUOCVhCmDNY
For those claiming the USA is falling behind in education I direct your attention to the Nobel Prizes in Science and Mathematics. With less then 5% of the worlds population, the USA routinely brings home the lions share of them. Often using other nations discards.
Every time I hear somebody saying the US Educational system sucks, I look and see the people responsible for that education wanting more money. More pay for less results? Has to be a Union involved.
“Design Margin” Now here is a Prime Example of pre 1970 (Pro-American) and post 1970 (Anti-American)! Pre 1970, large margin for growth anticipated. Post 1970 Little margin for growth, Remember this is when the “earth” was going to ether “Freeze” us (late 70′s), “Starve” us (1980′s), “over populate” us (1990′s) or “burn” us (2000) to death…. and if you read the NY Times from the late 1920′s you would see we have gone full circle back to burning up… between the late 1930′s thru the 1960′s it was Fascism, Communism, Nuclear war was gonna get us all…
DrJ @ 27…
I’m guessing you’re too young!
We started Chem 1A and Calculus 3A, or whatever it was called, in the Fall Semester of ’63! (The year it rained all fall-winter)
We being my best friend from Grammar and High School at Berkeley together at a room and board place where we stayed at what appeared to be an old Motel, and an amazing lady who served us all food from the basement of her old house about a block up Hearst Ave.
(Motel building still shows up on Google Maps!)
Anyhoo, I was a little better at Chem and Physics, he was a LOT better at Calculus, otherwise I would never had made it out of that class alive.
The lectures were delivered to a class of about 400, I think, but when we broke up into whatever the smaller groups were called, we had an Indian TA who week after week would start at the top left corner of the front Blackboard, fill it from the top down and to the right with a proof or multiple proofs and then continue on the blackboards on the right wall until they were also filled!
I sat there dazed.
One young Indian Woman seemed to be one of the few actually following along and would ask questions.
For Chem 1A, we usually had a lecturer with a heavy southern accent, but Dick Powell would actually show up from time to time. (Textbook was the classic 600 page Hildebrand and Powell Principles of Chemistry) Molal Solutions were very big at the time.
Chem Labs were in the brand-new Lattimer Hall on the second floor.
This Page has a photo of just how they looked back in the day!
—
51. tomw
“47 peterike:
Black and brown children have significantly lower ability for math, period,”
Not if those brown children happen to be Indian!
Sometimes the Muse whispers ever more insistently than others. Recent (perhaps unconscious) warnings are showing up in popular films.
Whether it’s the inexorable Welfare Zombies, or the spot-on characterization of “The Capital” in the Hunger Games, or the startling, Socialist soliloquy in the latest Batman it seems we are being shown our fate.
Modern day writing on the wall, I guess. Or Ghosts of Present and Future.
I thought at the time that 9/11 might re-calibrate us towards Original Intent. Electing a man named Barack Hussein Obama a mere eight years later proved me wrong.
RE: algebra and math
Algebra is fundamental and accessible to anyone of average IQ. Mathematics beyond algebra is different. It is more abstract and less integral to everyday existence, a specialty field that requires aptitude and, normally, employment-related motivation.
The “re-purposing” of the national research labs has nothing to do with learning or algebra.
@41: This is a symptom of a high-level leadership vacuum, a lack of the vision that tasks and coordinates the laboratories. Inter-laboratory coordination between the disparate labs seems very lacking. What’s emerged is that each lab is fiefdom competing against the others in the wake….I’ve always considered that the lab could be doing much better were it given a clearer mission, a succinct problem statement on which to focus. As it is, we are blown hither and thither by the prevailing winds of fad. Yes, fad. Science is quite faddish, and there’s always a hot new buzzword coming down on us.
Calls for “leadership” (and “vision”) in the context of the case being made for autocracy (as per poster “Matt” on this site) suggest a definitional refinement is in order. What exactly do We the People expect from leaders, in general, and political leaders, in particular?
The second point about cooperation vs competition also reaches out directly to the heart (and soul) of capitalist enterprise. Is the current “paradigm” adequate or should it be refined after collapse of institutional banking? How is reform possible in an environment where it is widely believed that “government is the problem?” Are we back to the “self correcting” models? Different context but same questions.
The third point about specificity of objective – a Mission Statement to die for, so to speak – yes and no: applied research, yes; basic research, no.
The fourth point about fads infiltrating science is reminiscent of IBM kicking a very young and very weird Bill Gates out of its offices.
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None of which is to pick on anybody, or advocate putting kids back into uniform (if we’re going to go there, I’d like to be rich, beautiful and thin for the rest of my life) but to reinforce the point:
@30: There were a number of reasons for the thorium reactors being shut down including an ultimately failed effort to push limited resources into a breeder reactor. But the biggest reason was that the military wanted dual use reactors. That is reactors that in a pinch could create nuclear weapons.
The military has long been the force behind basic and applied research in this country, which is still true, in terms of leadership and vision – and financing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The educational angle is more concerning at the level of the special-needs individual. As noted above by others, those who can learn, will. Those who have “impairments” (physical, family, social, etc.) will be “left behind.” Not only will their lives be diminished but they will create a lower tier of society with all the attendant problems.
The reason we have no energy policy is that there are NO new, known energy sources yet to be exploited. What we have is what we can get. We can only try and do a better job of what we have to work with.
Nuclear power was the last big discovery and we’re still a long way from fully utilizing it. We certainly do a good job of making electricity from uranium but could do much better even there. In addition, there are new applications we could be exploring.
The focus must be on the basic physics. Unfortunately, there are few tantalizing notions out there in the physics world of possible new sources.
What the national labs were built for was to exploit nuclear; they got off to a good start but the political environment decided we didn’t really want to squeeze more out of nuclear so the guys at the labs were turned to other purposes.
Now, the very few new nuclear projects with prospects (nuclear rockets, high temp hydrogen productions reactors) have been strangled at birth. Can you imagine private investors funding a new reactor design and actually building it on private land?
For energy exploitation, private enterprise is just so much more enterprising – so long as the government stays away.
John Wesley worried about the problem presented by Christianity: that it brought success and wealth which necessarily eroded faith. The U.S. has worked thus far because of the Christian consensus that formed its foundation. The Christian consensus is gone, and the success has produced both a loss of perspective and a loss of faith. Loss of faith in God is a loss of faith in self, the latter being an expression of the former.
But we won’t know who we are until we face adversity again. We know a few things, though: that the leftist elites who are consciously and unconsciously working to destroy us and what we represent constitute only about 25% of the population; that we are still a Christian nation, for the most part, no matter what Obumbles says; that the ascent of man will go on for sure, against all apparent odds, always has, and that it still has the best chance of doing so with us at the helm.
What we do here, largely under Wretchard’s guidance, is to document the crumbling of the old edifice and look for signs of the new. A quick look at Drudge today suggests that the enemy is hastily preparing the battlefield. Looks like a drone is coming to a sky near you, 30,000 expected domestically by 2020. The cops are all being outfitted like the Colorado shooter. Meanwhile, even Scalia is talking about the likelihood of reigning in the 2nd amendment.
Pretty soon, there will be plenty of adversity to go around and, who knows? Our lives may have real meaning again.
Of course government entities devolve into corrupt poltical organizations. What’s to stop it? This is why a goal of society is best achieved in a free market system, except for a very few specific examples, such as a military. Anything else needs free market competition AND, like the horse and buggy, sometimes needs to end. Government prevents evolving and the end of useless entites. This is the message that cannot be stated often enough.
I think it was Krauthammer that said that Conservatives think Liberals are stupid and Liberals think Conservatives are evil. But lets take that thought just a little further. Isn’t it evil to refuse to acknowledge the impossible math of the welfare state? A 100% tax rate on the wealthy’s income cannot pay the current expenses of the welfare state. So the Statists steal from those who are not even born yet. Isn’t that evil? The refusal to acknowledge the reality of simple math is evil.
Here is what Heinlein thought about who should have the right to vote:
From:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/09/heinlein_on_vot.html
” Here’s one of Heinlein’s modest proposals for improving democracy:
A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education – e.g., step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over the booth – and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system – smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers – and fathers – decline to be humiliated twice.
Then he gets a little Swiftian:
There are endless variations on this one. Here are two: Improving the Breed — No red light, no bell…but the booth opens automatically – empty. Revenue — You don’t risk your life, just some gelt. It costs you 1/4 oz. troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth. Solve your quadratic and vote, and you get your money back. Flunk – and the state keeps it. With this one I guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.”
Not sure if quadratic equation is the best device though. After all, it has two correct answers, only one of which usually works as a real world solution. It would not be wise to give the politicians any ideas.
CharlesWhite @ 52,
“College Academia is the refuge of Progressivism and the fortress of Liberalism, the engine of Anti-Americanism! ”
While perusing the Berkeley Campus with Google Maps, I noticed the student Hangout that was known as “The Bear’s Lair” when I was there is now called “The Free Speech Movement Cafe”!
Oops! That’s something that didn’t yet exist when I was there. The Lair was in the student union building adjoining Sproul Plaza where the Free Speech Movement began.
It’s now called “The Martin Luther King Jr Student Union Association”
No doubt Free Speech has magically morphed into Politically Correct Speech…
New also is the “Cesar Chavez Learning Center” …
I bet the fact that he was an anti illegal immigrant activist is never discussed, much less “learned” about!
It’s getting worse, think I’ll find something else to do!
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Black Bart @ 62,
“Of course government entities devolve into corrupt poltical organizations. What’s to stop it? This is why a goal of society is best achieved in a free market system, except for a very few specific examples, such as a military. Anything else needs free market competition AND, like the horse and buggy, sometimes needs to end. Government prevents evolving and the end of useless entites. This is the message that cannot be stated often enough.
I think it was Krauthammer that said that Conservatives think Liberals are stupid and Liberals think Conservatives are evil. But lets take that thought just a little further. Isn’t it evil to refuse to acknowledge the impossible math of the welfare state?”
—
We’ll just call it “New Math”
…until it isn’t.
re: 19 Stoicheon “I think that accounts for the current assault on the middle class. Socialists want a lower class of drones, serfs, what ever and an upper class of them”.
The trouble is that these would be rulers aren’t going to clear the bar. Lazy, indolent and vapid products of leftist echo chambers. These are not Northumbrian Kings of old, by any stretch of their own imagination, even.
Hell, even old crookback Dick went down with a lucern hammer in his hands. These weaklings will be the death of us all.
We should strike first.
Doug @57
I’m guessing you’re too young!
We started Chem 1A and Calculus 3A … in the Fall Semester of ’63!
Right you are — you beat me there by a decade and a half. You must have gone through some interesting times.
And it was still the Bear’s Lair when I was there.
TenderIsTheNight @ 59:
Mine wasn’t meant to be a call for autocracy, or expanded central power, in any way. Just better leadership.
61. maineman – Meanwhile, even Scalia is talking about the likelihood of reigning in the 2nd amendment.
and
62. Black Bart – I think it was Krauthammer that said that Conservatives think Liberals are stupid and Liberals think Conservatives are evil.
Krauthammer may have borrowed the line at some point, but it was actually Rush Limbaugh who originally coined it, way back in the early 1990′s. Of course, Limbaugh, being the spewer of vitriolic hate speech, as the media thoughtfully and constantly reminds us, didn’t actually say that Liberals are “stupid”. He said that Conservatives think Liberals are “wrong and misguided” and Liberals think Conservatives are evil. Saying you believe someone is “wrong or misguided”, well, you won’t find a clearer example of “hate speech”.
Now, for a more revealing glimpse into the mind of Krauthammer, and how he and Scalia are both statist ideological brethren:
“Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquility of the kind enjoyed by sister democracies such as Canada and Britain. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically. It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today. Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic – purely symbolic – move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.” – Charles Krauthammer, “Disarm the Citizenry”, The Washington Post, Friday, April 5, 1996, page A19
Through the years both Scalia and Krauthammer have somehow acquired commonly accepted reputations as conservatives and/or defenders of freedom/the Constitution/etc.. Those reputations are unmerited, and dangerous for those who place their trust and hope in them to “do the right thing”.
While both men are brilliant, erudite and accomplished, they are, distilled to their essence, authoritarian statists. The Krauthammer quote speaks for itself – he has never recanted nor walked it back. Scalia is more subtle and clever, necessarily due to the exigencies of his position on the Court, but if you look at the totality of his legal product it becomes clear that he’s primarily focused on upholding the authority of the State, and the Law(and of course he and his SCOTUS colleagues ARE the Law), and not nearly so much on the threats to the rights and freedom of the people. While he generally, so far, has come down mostly on “our side”, Scalia has, in some very revealing cases, engaged in some of the same twisted, contorted and legally and ethically repugnant legal sophistry as demonstrated recently by Chief Justice Roberts.
Neither man gives a rat’s behind about the rights and freedom of the people from the perspective of the Founding fathers and the philosophy and principles they expressed in the Declaration. Krauthammer is unimportant, but Scalia and countless others of our elites who hold positions of actual power are now constantly giving signals or telegraphing clues that Angelo Codevilla’s “Ruling Class” are preparing to do whatever is necessary to ensure that the “Common Class” remains under control.
maineman’s noting of Scalia’s coy evasiveness about the 2nd Amendment is perceptive. Those who believe that Scalia et al. or the Republicans in the Senate are going to block the UN small arms treaty backdoor evisceration of our gun rights are going to be shocked at who betrays them.
Government programs in search of a mission? Isn’t that upside down thinking? These government programs were conceived and created to cope with discrete problems or to reach concrete goals. Why doesn’t a government program end when the problem does? Is that inconceivable? At the time of the breakup of AT&T, it seemed to be horrible that we would lose Bell Labs and all that great potential and creativity. As it turns out, we found there is a universe beyond the wonders of the princess phone on a land line. What these government programs are looking for now is busy work to round out careers before retirement, but they don’t stop hiring.
Not every advance comes from government or government-funded projects. Right now manufacturing is undergoing a revolution based on so-called 3D printing. This has emerged through at least 30 different companies working over the past 20 years. They now make turbine blades and virtually everything else this way. Future manufacturing will not be mass production on assembly lines. Government involvement has been marginal.
I would like to see the day when we can actually consider closing down government agencies, like a cabinet-level department. Why are government programs carved in granite for the ages?