Senior Scientist at GNS Science (New Zealand equivalent of USGS more or less). Programmer, modeller, dabbling in physics, geology, geophysics. Back-roomer and like it that way.
Phil Scadden
Perhaps I am too cynical here, but the first step towards a peace plan has to be desire for peace. It seems to me that Netanyahu needs arab aggression to stay in power (and stay out of jail), while Hamas needs Israeli aggression to retain support for violent resistance. Until that changes, well good luck. There is an old comment about the prayer for the “Peace of Jerusalem” by Meron Benverish, “You can have peace or you can have Jerusalem.” I dont see that changing in my lifetime.
Some self-administered CBT. The VA CBT-I app helped, as did understanding the issue via the free course at https://insomniacoach.com/. Complimentary was doing some mindfulness stuff. There was key things that worked together and never looked back since.
NSW should have gone into hard lockdown (NZ style) as soon as the superspreader event was discovered. Qld, Vic and WA went early and eliminated quickly. Delaying lockdowns and doing them half-heartedly just means they gone on for longer and longer, doing far more economic damage than a short, sharp lockdown. It is very depressing to hear that large nos of new cases have been out and about community while infectious.
Hmm, having spent last year helping out with 3 people receiving cancer treatment and becoming badly immune-compromised by that, I have some sympathy. It is a nightmare for these people and their carers. Not just covid but flu as well. During first lockdown here in NZ, it was a lot easier. People masked, distanced and isolated. But post-vaccination, everyone just wants to get on with lives and everyday tasks become risky for the immune-compromised and close contacts. I say good for your wookie for asking for distancing. It is hard to do when not the norm. And good for you for giving that person space without a fuss. You dont know what their story may be.
Fascinating. As someone who has used map and compass from almost as long as I can remember, work with maps everyday and having lived most of my life pre-cellphone, your description was also an insight into another way of looking at the world. What is obvious to one is not obvious to another and I suspect I would get quickly lost in other worlds you inhabit.
Can I recommend that you do a little reading on geomorphology? I first read a textbook on that at high school and it changed the way I looked at the world. Landscapes talked back to me. Studying geology and making geological maps massively reinforced it. You can anticipate what the landscape will do as you trasverse it. Like geological mapping, you are doing constant bayesian updates. Building a model in your head, making predictions and then a very short time later comparing it to what is in the territory itself.
And more:
Kuenssberg challenged him on Vote Leave’s central promise – a £350m Brexit dividend for the NHS. “You knew very well then, and you know very well now, that that figure didn’t include the so-called rebate, the money that the UK got to keep,” she said. “Yes,” Cummings replied.He explained that he used the figure to focus the debate on the “balance sheet” of Britain’s EU membership, and to “drive the Remain campaign and the people running it crazy”.
“So it was a deliberate trap for the other side?” asked Kuenssberg.
“Yeah,” Cummings replied.
Looks to me like your average political animal, focussed mainly on winning rather than truth.
Well here (NZ), reclaimed land is often a very problematic climate and tectonic risk. Lots of discussion about managed retreat. Ok, plenty of 19th C stuff was done badly, but engineering for sealevel rise, earthquake (liquifaction), tsunami and storm exposure isnt cheap. Also, we have had too much finding-out-the-hard-way that coastal wetland was performing valuable environmental services that are not easily replaced. I am happy to have strong regulations around that. To make it work and be economic to maintain over very long term, then I think you need to have large area of land created compared to length of your seawall (the Dutch situation) and yes, the easy ones have been taken.
Sorry for late reply. I meant that Contact begins with Eleanor listening to the sounds being picked up the radio telescopes and then suddenly hears the gutteral throbbing of the alien message.
“What makes you believe that?”
Largely based on studies on class size. Some say effect is only modest but reducing class size from 35 to 25 is pretty meaningless. Reducing below 20 though is different story. A high-needs child in a large classroom is really going struggle—only so much time that a teacher can give them. I have also looked at what experiments in “Charter schools” have done—with much higher $$ per child than state are able give.Anecdotally, (and from serving on school board), what is wanted is quality teachers but pay and conditions make retention difficult.
Having lived with teachers, in-laws are teachers, daughter and daughter-in-law are teachers, I find some of criticism of schools unrealistic. Faced with 30 kids, 10 of them from dysfunctional homes, 3 with specific learning difficulties and expectations from society/government that they will be ready pass this exam at end of the year, some tough choices get made. Getting better results from schools needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out. Pay out lots of dough to private schools and you get two big bonuses—much smaller classes and far fewer children from dysfunctional families.
I am pretty interested to see where this goes. Making good observations seems very dependent on what we are looking for, (and having a vocabulary for the observation). Ways to break through some of these borders?
I suspect that is asking too much of the religiously zealous. A Buddist country with oversight of an internationalised quarter seems more likely to fly.
After reading Amos Elon’s “Jerusalem—City of Mirror” (good book for anyone wondering why this is so hard), I thought the best we could hope for would be a meteor strike cratering the whole of the temple mount for starters.
To understand the danger, think of the geopolitical implications of 4th temple nutters blowing up everything in the Al-Aqsa compound ( a serious proposition).
Fascinating question as what advice I would give my high school self if I could. “Dont be such a prat” would be good start. Listen much more than talk, figure out how people work without trying to change them. Try lots of things (safely) and have fun. Be an agent for good things. Read everything (not advice I needed). Dont wait till uni before trying to change the world. Dont be afraid to fail, just learn from it. Master calculus as fast as you can and then learn the science properly instead of way curriculum prescribes. Master some form of coding. Find some physical activity that you really like (with the old dictum of “if you cant do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly”).
Excellent! Not feeling tired makes it a lot easier to enjoy life.
This was a fascinating post, but I found a surprising statement in the introduction:
“who are shy about telling us when their peers’ work is completely wrong.”
This runs deeply against my experience. I would say writing a paper gleefully proving your peers wrong is second only to writing a paper with an important new discovery in terms of academic satisfaction. In the middle of one controversy a colleague claimed (or maybe quoted) “Every paper published is a shot fired in a war”.
This is obviously running counter to your experience and I wonder how you came to that conclusion? Are we talking about well-cited papers that are “completely wrong”—or just that newer papers have effectively replaced them in the corpus.
ChristianKI. That I think is a USA problem, but many teachers here (NZ) have rated teaching college as pretty much waste of time, with all their real learning coming from ground-zero experience under good mentors. As I perceive it, the problem with teaching college is that they are closely aligned with the university system and lecturers want to teach their research interests, not necessarily “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom”. My daughter-in-law went through experimental system where she was put into classroom of low-decile school as paid teacher after only a few weeks of intensive training, albeit with far reduced hours and a mentor. A few week-long intensive training camps during the year. Something of “crucible experience” with I gather a substantial dropout rate and a longer route to full teacher registration, but arguably a better training than college. Long term analysis of the programme will be interesting.
To me vocabulary (which I think is a brain shortcut to a category/concept) is a big help in seeing. I read “Landmarks” (Robert MacFarlane) which was about specialised vocabularies and I enjoyed some of the odd words. One was “smeuse”—a hole in hedge or fence made by repeated passage of animals. The thing is, once I had read about it, I suddenly started noticing them. But to your question as where do the words come from? The vocabularies in Landmarks come from specialised needs of people in particular environments. Peat-diggers need more specialised words to describe peat bogs to survive and proper.
So observation does proceed vocabulary. Science is full of it -every field has to develop of specialized vocab to communicate observation. But once there is a vocab, then its strongly assists observation. Can this hinder seeing? Yes, that too. The brain will take whatever shortcut it can and schemata will miss plenty when the brain has more urgent things to do. Watson’s excuse for the not knowing the no. of stairs would be that he never needed to—he had more important things to think about.
But I think there are ways to employ both. Early in my career, I had do a fair amount of mudlogging from coal exploration wells—a boring but vital job. We had a standardized vocabulary for describing what we saw that was structured into a list. Working your way through it, metre by metre, kept you observing what was important even when bored out of your skull. And at the end of list was—“what is different?”. A key to make a novel observation that was outside the parameters of the list.
Would be more useful if included OS and free/paid/subscription with the program name.
Thanks for this (and love the cards—a brake on just skimming it). So I am goofing off reading LessWrong when I should be working. Furthermore, completing the current job will make it possible to do more exciting things and please my colleagues. Why am I goofing off and reading an article on self-control of all things? I got a useful insight though. The priority one job is QC of a dataset. It is intense, boring, but too complex, too important to delegate. I diagnose Depletion of Energy and thus deserve a break! Nice rationalisation. Thanks very much. Now back to work...
In a press conference, he claims. “Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning,” I am failing to find mention of coronavirus in that original. I also note https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/26/dominic-cummings-says-he-did-not-tell-whole-truth-about-journeys-to-durham-barnard-castle.
I remain unconvinced that he is “extremely committed to truth-seeking”.