we are just an investment toy

Ireland is civilized. Russia isn't.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I can add manually. Subtraction is harder. I once could extract a square root by hand! No more.

There's no reason to do math by hand any more. But ballpark estimation, to maybe 5 or 10% accuracy, is valuable.

If an 0603 resistor is dissipating roughly a milliwatt, I don't need to calculate any closer.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I like doing calculus problems, ChatGPT is substantially better at calculus than I am. Not bad at all for a bucket o bolts that wasn't even designed to do it in the first place, the way a CAS like Mathematica was.

Going back to blue books for everything worth any serious points is was a lot of professors/departments are already doing; these days it's common to end up with a strongly bimodal distribution, a smattering of

Means of 65 on exams regularly aren't just a problem for students, it looks bad for professors and causes management and parents alike to freak out, they don't figure they're paying $58,000 a year for Johnny to have a 2.1 GPA.

I like doing crossword puzzles. But, I don't let them get in the way of my $WORK.

As a kid, I used to total the groceries in my mother's cart to see if she could make use of a "spend $10 and get a free..." coupon. Keeping track of the pennies was important. Now, I keep a "feel" for whether I need to round the next subtotal UP or DOWN, based on past items tallied. I don't care if the actual total comes out to be 37.88 or 38.45 -- it's "about $38". I trust the machine to not cheat in it's arithmetic processing!

There is still value in this sort of guesstimating as I'd be alerted to a total of $43 ("It failed to give me my discount!").

On one occasion, I purchased two (identical) items for $9.99 ea. And, had $22 in cash in my hand to pay the young girl at the register. When she announced the total to be $43, I smiled and asked her "What's wrong with this picture?" She couldn't see the disconnect between two $10 items and a $40+ total, even after trying to point that out to her in "simple-speak".

"Just ring it up, again, please."

I welcome labor-savers of all sorts. They free me from the boring, "grunt work". I have no desire to verify setup and hold times in synchronous circuits, power dissipation in components, edge cases in algorithms, etc. And, there is absolutely *no* value in being able to balance parens in a complex LISP function!

Sadly, it would take me more to learn how to *direct* an AI to do these things than it would for me to just do them, myself. With enough experience, you develop a sort of "muscle memory" for the menial tasks.

I think "homework" is grossly overrated and time consuming. And, I don't think it is "designed" with teaching in mind as much as giving the student something to work on. Shouldn't problems

If Johnny's a dolt, then what you pay is immaterial! Plan on keeping his bedroom intact until he's 40...

Nuclear power plants need tons of uranium, and turn it into very radioactive isotopes (as well as less radioactive longer-lived isotopes) as they generate power.

Drop an atomic bomb on a nuclear plant and you can make small country - say Belgium - uninhabitable for a few centuries. Elect the wrong bunch of clowns - Donald Trump does come to mind - and a civilised country can lose that status very quickly.

Radioactive isotopes are dangerous in unfamiliar ways.

Ireland is civilised at the moment. It was created by civil insurrection, and Northern Ireland wasn't all that civilised back when I lived in the UK.

The US used to be civilised. Then they elected Donald Trump for a second term and his supporters dismantled all the regulations that had restrained him during his first term.

That's not much of a problem. Used reactor fuel should be reprocessed.

Coal is a lot worse.

Don't do that.

OK, stay away.

Scairdy cat!

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That doesn't solve the problem. All you are doing is separating out the various radioactive isotopes. The short lived ones are very radioactive and the long-lived ones stay radioactive for a very long time (up to hundreds of thousand of years).

It isn't. It does present other problems - and getting the sulphur dioxide out of coal-fired power station smoke stacks took longer than it should have done - but radioactive junk is worse.

You don't get to choose.

Iran doesn't seem to be far enough away to keep him out of their hair. You don't seem to have noticed that Trump and Netanyahu killed off a substantial portion of Iran's administration recently, and the survivors aren't happy about it. They have some 400 kgm of highly enriched uranium which they could use to express their unhappiness. It hasn't yet been enriched enough to make a regular atomic bomb which could dropped from an aircraft (or if it has nobody is admitting it) but there do seem to be other options. I'd advise against a google search to find them. The spooks look for that kind of thing.

Being foolhardy gets you dead a whole lot faster.

Wildlife florishes in the forbidden Tjernobyl area.

OK, also in the US White house.

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"On 10/05/2026 11:16 pm, john larkin wrote: | |> On Sun, 10 May 2026 20:35:58 +1000, Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org| |> wrote: | |> | |>> On 10/05/2026 6:13 am, john larkin wrote: | |[. . .] | |> Coal is a lot worse. | | | |It isn't. [. . .]" | |------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Coal is not used much in Ireland.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] | |>> Radioactive isotopes are dangerous in unfamiliar ways. | |> | |> Scairdy cat! | | | |Being foolhardy gets you dead a whole lot faster." | |------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Scared cats survive. The dodos are dead. (S.

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |----------------------| |"Ireland is civilised"| |----------------------|

Please prove. (S.

It took a while, yet everybody in sixth grade demonstrated times-tables up to twelve.

Or, you know, they didn't pass sixth grade.

Then, you know, like they say, "newspaper articles are written at a sixth-grade level". So, students can either read the newspaper or not pass primary school.

To evaluate student progress, there should be a daily quiz.

Otherwise it's imagined that pretty much all the students fail pretty much all the closed-book tests, except for a few of the self-starting auto-learning variety.

I'm a big fan of "word lists" and "spelling tests". Daily.

If the student already has a firm grasp of the material and already did all his homework, then give him next years', in the same course. That's what they did to me in second grade, they handed out a workbook on the first day so I went home and did it, so I was already done with all my homework for pretty much the year, so, after the teacher took a look and it was correct and not just random nonsense, and not obviously filled in by somebody else, they got the next grades' workbook and I could work on that while everybody else was working on theirs. In this manner I got a few years ahead while yet in the same class.

Workbooks, that's another usual idea that "costs too much" I suppose.

It reminds me of one of the greatest lessons I ever got in third grade or so. There was some worksheet and I filled it in, then looking it over found a mistake. So, my pencil had an eraser, I hit the paper with my eraser and kind of reveled in the mistake going away, then providing the correct answer before handing it in. So, the teacher summoned me after class and told me I had made a mistake. And I disagreed, I said I'd erased it. Then, she told me that that _was_ the mistake, then instead of using the eraser, I was to cross out the error, and write the correction after the strikethrough text. This really opened my mind, because the lesson taught me that there's no erasing mistakes.

She was one of my favorite teachers, somehow from "England", which was quite exotic.

Heh, it reminds me one time my younger brother was going over the dictionary or one of the volumes of the encyclopedia from the book-shelf. So, later I'm looking at this book and I noticed that someone had practiced mother's signature forty or fifty times on the the otherwise blank frontispiece. Now, I imagined he figured that he only needed mother's signature to get his grade card returned to school, which is a pretty novel idea for a first grader who turned to the dictionary and encyclopedia when looking to do his homework.

Being independent was a large point of pride.

Penmanship was my worst subject in school.

Though, they did have enough left-handed scissors that usually they ran out of right-handed scissors first.

Also the teachers made the seating charts, and had their own desk in the front of the class, and controlled the classroom and the board, and nobody else was hovering around.

Everybody got their own book for the class. This is considered _fair_.

The "grade" as they say: that was considered a "permanent record".

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"On 5/9/2026 6:02 PM, bitrex wrote: | |[. . .] | |>> Calculators came along and we all feared no one would know how to | |>> "do arithmetic" -- let alone long division or cube roots.  Some | |>> retained those "manual" skillsets; others learned how to use the | |>> new *tool* to do the work for them. | |[. . .]" | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Cf. a short story by Asimov about a man who had the rare skill of being able to multiply.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"I welcome labor-savers of all sorts. They free me from the | |boring, "grunt work". [. . .] | |[. . .] | |[. . .] And, there is | |absolutely *no* value in being able to balance parens in | |a complex LISP function! | | | |Sadly, it would take me more to learn how to *direct* an AI | |to do these things than it would for me to just do them, | |myself. [. . .]" | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Emacs automatically helps with the parentheses!

Emacs LISP drew these quotations' boxes.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] If he thinks he already has a firm | |>> grasp, then why waste the time on the exercises?" | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I used to be so arrogant for 1 module during 1 semester so I used not attend its tutorials. That arrogance was a bad idea!

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"> Means of 65 on exams regularly aren't just a problem for students, it looks bad| |> for professors and causes management and parents alike to freak out, they don't | |> figure they're paying $58,000 a year for Johnny to have a 2.1 GPA." | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Uh, Isaac Newton had 2nd class honors, as did Rosalind Elsie Franklin.

Remember that we got FORTRAN from a person who almost did not pass a high school.

"The New-York Times" calls Ivar Giaever: "A former “D” student".

A problem is treating an examination mark as meaningful instead of fraudulent fiction presented as if it be a truth.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"If Johnny's a dolt, then what you pay is immaterial!" | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

True! I applied to a putative polytechnic for a research job. "Is it a good university?" said an interviewer about a university from which I graudated, so I replied: "A bad student at a good university is still a bad student." This putative polytechnic decided to award research-and-development grants to rivals who did not even have a degree!!! I searched via Google Scholar many years later, and it showed no publication by them! Of course though, they are ex-students of a 'doctor' on that recruitment jury.

A CV for 1 thereof dares to classify HTML or JavaScript as an advanced language!

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Plan on | |keeping his bedroom intact until he's 40..." | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

For much longer! Employed friends who are no dolt who are in their mid-40's to mid-50's live in parents' houses. (S.

I met a savant, many years ago. He was *scary fast* with what he could do in his head (I don't need to rely on paper but take tens of seconds to do things that he did nearly instantly!).

Emacs was being written about the time I was using LISP (50 yrs ago)

I have macros to do similar in Brief (which I much prefer to emacs but which is no longer a viable tool given the presence of timing loops in its ASM implementation)

I recall an argument I had where I had proclaimed PostScript a "programming language". A concept that many can't seem to get their heads around (cutting the association with "printing") despite showing them real "programs" that didn't "print" at all!

Why did you stop using it?

Try CRiSP.

It wasn't yet written in the mid 70's. And, we didn't have PCs back then. I was typically using qedx under MULTICS.

I was disappointed in it.

I meant Lisp. In my whole career I've only ever met one other engineer who had even tried to learn Lisp.

It was part of our freshman AI course. It is a lot easier to codify certain types of problems in LISP. Nowadays, there are other variants (e.g., scheme) that may be more commonly encountered.

LISP, as a practical language, is horribly inefficient (wrt resource utilization) so likely doesn't have much real value outside of academia. Nowadays, I suspect they don't even teach things like lambda calculus -- possibly too abstract (it seems the emphasis, nowadays, is on more PRACTICAL technologies: Do this to get that.)

You snipped a lot of context there. I was responding to John Larkin, who claims to be of Irish descent, and reacting to his claim that Ireland is civilised when Russia isn't.

I did go on to point out that southern Ireland had got it's independence in the 1920's by methods that had included quite a lot of civil insurrection, and that Northern Ireland had been tolerably uncivilised in more recent times in pursuit of a similar sort of self-rule.

I think you are guilty of text-chopping here - by changing the meaning of my text by quoting a small chunk of it out of context.