kids, math

I have actually 'felled' a tree from the bottom up: I cleared the lowest branches and then made two horizontal cuts about 18 inches apart in the trunk, with wedges taking the weight to avoid trapping the saw. With the tree roped to its neighbours to keep it vertical I knocked out the section between the cuts so that the tree dropped straight down about 18 inches.. I kept going like this until it was all down.

"The past" is Ten Commandment Judeao-Christian Enlightenment Constitutional values.

The point is not that the ideal prosperous tolerant society never existed - of course it didn't - but that we have made progress and, erratically, continue to make progress.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

There most definitely are. I've been making a living doing just that for many years now.

The most useful question at that stage is something like "if the xx system failed (or never existed), what bad thing would be happening?

There may have been news releases et al giving the general intent.

Joe

I think not. The big changes in the last 500 years have been crop yields, clean water and sanitation, transport, medicine, literacy, lifetimes, personal freeedoms, electrification. The conservatives that I know approve of those and want more.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

People around here send their kids to private schools if they can afford it. We sent ours to a Catholic school because it was so good and only cost about $7K.

Those Jesuits were actually very cool.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But, that just indicates their aspirations. Many are deluded into thinking

Then you don't know RFK who doesn't seem to want people to get vaccinated. He wouldn't form part of your social circle, but he should be a conservative you know of.

Literacy goes back a lot longer than 500 years. Universal literacy had to wait until the Agricultural Revolution made it practical to have most kids stuck in school getting literate rather than out at work growing more food. That also needed printed books - without mechanical printing there wouldn't have been enough school books to make it work.

Clean water and sanitation depend on civil engineering. That in turn depended on getting enough people educated to the point where fancier engineering than the Romans could manage becomes practical.

Conservatives like their comforts, when somebody else has developed them, but they hate to social changes that come with them.

The Enlightenment wasn't Judo-Christian - Spinoza was expelled by his synagogue - and the christian churches didn't like the Enlightenment at all. And the US constitution is a moderate enlightenment document - subsequent constitutions have all reflected the radical enlightenment, and reflect the interests of the population as a whole rather than a prosperous elite.

The US has quite a lot of catching up to do.

In the US wealth is more heritable than height. Parents paying to get their kids a good education means that there is not a lot of pressure from the well-heeled to raise the quality of the education available to those kids whose parents are less-well-off.

Business would probably benefit if US primary and secondary education worked better, but so far you've been able to import skilled people from other countries. Sadly, your health care isn't great and the skilled immigrants are starting go for places where their children will be better looked after.

It's scary to think about all the public utilities and refineries and breweries that are running on ancient control systems that the CE graduate kids couldn't fix.

I know a guy who teaches a 2-year hands-on course in control systems at Sierra College. His grads can do real stuff.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

A very historic bridge near here has recently been refurbished. Its main claim to fame was that it was an experimental cable-stayed bridge which looked like a suspension bridge ... but wasn't. The original designer, in 1836, had done some amazing calculations of the tensile and compressive forces to prove that the idea could be made to work safely.

The 'refurbishment' had completely destroyed the original structure and turned it into a lookalike suspension bridge. When I enquired why this had been done, I was told the computer model used by the engineers couldn't cope with the original calculations, so they altered the bridge to suit the available software.

Which one was that? I'm surprised that they were able to get away with that sort of gratuitous "improvement". Most such historically important structures are grade 2, 2* or 1 listed and have to be replaced like for like using the technology and methods of the period (*very* expensive).

Where did this happen?

The iconic Teesside Transporter bridge (which is only a century old) is presently closed because repair costs are impossibly high. It may yet collapse into the river before politicians can agree on what to do...

Likewise the various spectacular bridges across the Tyne at Newcastle.

Victoria Bridge in Bath, designed by James Dredge.

You just keep the material you drilled out.

I highly doubt that, having talked to a lot of kids about it.

We are not talking about math degrees. Those are much less useful than physics degrees except for a teaching career. We are talking about math basics as a foundation for doing a job. Heck, people even make colossal personal financial mistakes because they lack basic math skills. I know for sure because I have counseled many as a volunteer. Simple stuff like not being able to understand compounded interest. One classic example:

"Why did you pay $100/month for seven years on a self storage unit? What's in it?"

"An older vehicle that I want to restore some day."

"What do you think it's worth after restoration?"

"About $5000."

"Ok, let's do the math."

... <scribbling on paper> ...

"Oh!"

When I interviewed people it because quite obvious to me that those who went through Jesuit High were somehow always among the top contenders.

This is where the public school system could learn. But they seem to be learn-resistant, in part because of unions.

However, they tend to rejuvenate innovation capability by acquiring smaller companies. Both of my employers were bought by Philips. So they didn't train their own people to develop the products but bought whole teams from external.

And now they sold much of their component business to the Chinese, with no so great yet predictable consequences :-(

Almost none of them does, usually it's quarter to quarter :-(

Real innovation happens in small and very small companies. At least until they get bought out and then you start another one.

They were at their best before the 1960s - after that they just started behaving like any other company run by accountants. (I know one of the founding Philips family was an accountant but he didn't run the company,)

When I was an undergraduate an appreciable number of my fellow students were Jesuit brothers. As the sexual abuse scandals in Catholic schools became better publicised, most of those Jesuits left the church.

The resistance to a particular style of teaching may be well-founded.

The Jesuits were good at selecting clever students. This had the downside that the students were quick to detect when they were being exploited.

Sexual exploitation is just one of the ways an authoritatian system can abuse the people it has authority over.

My wife did very well out of psychology - actually psycholinguistics - her undergraduate majors were psychology and linguistics.

Her graduate students are professors all over the place. Ironically, one of her post-docs became Noam Chomsky's boss, or a least she was when Noam moved from MIT to Arizona in 2017. Since Chomsky moved to Brazil after his stroke in 2023, she probably isn't now.

Admittedly my wife did unusually well - very few academics get to be a directors of a Max Planck Institute - but if you are good the sky is the limit.

You probably don't move in the circles where that kind of thing happens. I once (as an undergraduate) had to find an integral for my father's work on his counter-current continuous digestor (which digested wood to paper pulp for the paper-making industry), and I just asked my math tutor, who wrote it down on the spot. A more formal literature search would have been more expensive.

Ignorant and incorrect assertion. Cambridge Instruments had a staff mathematician and I got helpful corrections from him quite often.

Bell Labs had a long list (23). Bode, Shannon, Karnaugh and Hamming are names that even I can recognise. George Stibitz designed the first binary relay computer there in 1937.

There should have been a few at EMI Central Research, but I never ran into them. Our phase array ultrasound had marginally better spatial resolution than its computer modelling had suggested, because the computer model quantised propagation delays in 1nsec steps, introducing a quantisation error. My 1964 "Theory of Computation 1" course at Melbourne had covered that, and it had informed the little bit computer modelling that I did at EMI.

Hobby projects can be expensive.