🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
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Thought you already had that since 1866?
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Bad Idea: [url=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/the-queen-isnt-dead-bbc-apologises-after-rogue-tweet-sends-everyone-in-a-spin-10294504.html]tweeting that the Queen is dead[/url]. When you're a BBC reporter.
No-one can quite agree on what happened. First of all the reporter deleted the tweets and said she's left her phone unattended and someone had played a 'silly prank'. Then the BBC tried to deny it had happened at all. Then it transpired there was a rehearsal for the Queen's death, which the BBC carry out every year. One version of the story is that it was overheard and mistaken for the real thing, but supposedly all BBC staff had been warned about it and new it was going on.
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So, again, the world's media just starts parroting itself instead of, y'know, doing journalism
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Of course, now the stories are all about the gaffe - whether in attempts to bury the fact that any of the news sources reporting it fell for the prank (or mistake, or whatever) and reported it as real, I haven't dug enough to find out.
Notably absent for the list of sources with stories on this are the BBC, which is a bit of a shame.
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Casualties grow as the hostilities peak: fully 0 people have died of shock just this past hour. More at 11.
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You have to ask...what do we gain? Lots of confusion, lots of cost. Not really any better off in the end. Just using a different system. I will admit that it probably makes more sense than most other parts of Democrat platforms.
To be fair, there is at least some continuing cost to using a different system. The usual (perhaps overly-dramatic) example is the Mars Climate Orbiter. One could place blame on the engineers, but I think the fact of the matter is that having two separate unit systems is, at least to an extent, asking for that sort of trouble. Mistakes aren't usually made in a vacuum. There are also lots of more minor costs, involved in making different product versions for different countries.Now, would the cost of switching be worth it? I have no freaking clue. Probably not. Like I said, I don't have a dog in the fight (though I do actually rather prefer Fahrenheit for day-to-day temperature measurements).
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One could place blame on the engineers, but I think the fact of the matter is that having two separate unit systems is, at least to an extent, asking for that sort of trouble.
You don't need legislation to fix that though
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You don't need legislation to fix that though
In fact, wasn't it a violation of the contract?
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You don't need legislation to fix that though
Technically you don't, but the fact of the matter is that when highway signs are all in miles and kids in school are first taught feet and inches and the NWS reports temperatures in degrees F by default, etc., you're going to wind up with people who think in imperial a lot more than if all of those things presented metric or even both.Edit: said another way, even if the market somehow magically decided to start showing stuff in metric units when they could, I suspect a large part of what most people see day-to-day would still be imperial if you didn't have legislation in addition to the market forces.
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Having two separate unit systems is, at least to an extent, asking for ... trouble.
The real root of the problem is that tetrapods have five digits (except all the animals that secondarily lost some of them, of course). It should clearly have been six. If it was six, we wouldn't have all this trouble with metric vs Imperial/whatever you call your crazy US units.
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Imperial/whatever you call your crazy US units
US Customary, I believe.
Presumably you have to start using them from the moment you go through U.S. Customs.
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You have to ask...what do we gain? Lots of confusion, lots of cost. Not really any better off in the end. Just using a different system. I will admit that it probably makes more sense than most other parts of Democrat platforms.
It would be less confusing and less costly. The problem of having to convert between two systems all the time would be gone. The problem of teaching kids imperial units and then telling them to forget it when they get to college science would be gone. The epidemic of crashing mars probes because of two systems would finally come to an end!
More seriously, we're already in the middle of a long, slow move to use metric. An abrupt shift would be a bad idea. Although I don't think that's what's being proposed. He's probably just saying government material should always state at least metric units even if they retain imperial units for now or something like that.
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kids in school are first taught feet and inches...
And we're somehow falling behind in math and science...
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US Customary, I believe.
Mostly, we don't call them anything as a group. It's just how you measure stuff.
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And we're somehow falling behind in math and science...
This is a problem with the mix of immigrants, largely. Ethnic groups in the US generally outperform the same groups back in the "home countries," from what I've seen (based on PISA scores). But mix in lots of students from low performing countries and guess what happens?
Not that I think we have education all figured out, of course.
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This is a problem with the mix of immigrants, largely
Apparently, when you remove the low-income students from the test, the scores skyrocket. Which could support your assertion if you assume immigrants tend to be low-income, but also could point to the obvious fact that school districts with less income perform worse on test scores, which we've known for ages. Probably partially due to less income to attract good teaching talent, and partially probably due to low-income homes providing a less stimulating environment overall for a child to learn, but those I don't have proof for.
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Lots of confounding factors, agreed. But claims of "we're falling behind" are not as robust as they seem to think they are.
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Well, it depends. "We're falling way behind in poor areas" is fair enough, and something we ought to address. But gloom and doom predictions of international CEOs being ridiculed for not knowing basic math is ludicrous: rich white kids are getting as good an education as ever.
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Asian kids are getting good educations, too (and filing discrimination lawsuits against Harvard). Poor hispanics get better educations than they would have gotten in Mexico or Central America. Poor black kids are getting better educations than they would in Africa. Whites are getting better educations than they would have in Europe.
But it's fun to hate on America. Or maybe they just want more H1-Bs to keep costs down. Motivations will vary.
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Whites are getting better educations than they would have in Europe.
Debateable, but let's be honest, the differences are going to be pretty slim anyway.
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Poor hispanics get better educations than they would have gotten in Mexico or Central America. Poor black kids are getting better educations than they would in Africa.
Yeah, but everyone agrees American education is better than Mexican or African. If America's poor aren't getting as good an education as, say, Germany's poor, that's something we're more interested in. Once they're here, we ought to be teaching them as best we can, you know? The lowest common denominator ought to be reasonably educated for modern life.
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If America's poor aren't getting as good an education as, say, Germany's poor, that's something we're more interested in.
I agree that it is something to look at, but the next sentence after where you quoted boom is:
Whites are getting better educations than they would have in Europe.
So there is disagreement on the basis of where you are making that comparison. In addition when you are talking about trying to get schools to compensate for the confounding factors that you both acknowledged (less attracting good teachers, less stimulating home, etc.) there are limits to what can be done (and stricter limits to what is economical to compensate for). But while having another argument about where "good 'nough" lies is a bad idea, can we not have it in the bad ideas thread?
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It's really difficult to compare a place as diverse as America with other places.
Nevertheless, what's happened to a lot of school districts here is abominable.
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Nevertheless, what's happened to a lot of school districts here is abominable.
A large part of it is poverty. There's been lots of research that shows poor attainment is linked to that all over the world, and that it's independent of race. (Strictly, whether someone is poor — or rather whether they have poor parents — might be racially linked, but it is the poverty that causes most of the trouble.) There appears to be a lot of things that follow from that, such as a less nurturing family, a noisier environment, and a more chemically-contaminated environment, in addition to social and financial stressors.
Life really shits on the poor.
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A large part of it is poverty.
I was going to go with the ought-to-be-criminal scourge that is public unions, but sure, poverty doesn't help.
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The real root of the problem is that tetrapods have five digits (except all the animals that secondarily lost some of them, of course). It should clearly have been six. If it was six, we wouldn't have all this trouble with metric vs Imperial/whatever you call your crazy US units.
If you have to count on your fingers and toes to do measurements, you're at a disadvantage whether you have five toes or six.
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Also...MALE PRIVILEGE! Because we can count a little bit higher.
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Also...MALE PRIVILEGE! Because we can count a little bit higher.
Very little, Boomzilla; tiny even.
Walked into that one, didn't you?
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Walked into that one, didn't you?
Yes. I even
'd you by calling myself out on it in the post. 
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It wouldn't surprise me if it's a case of 'Whah would we wanna use Cahmmunist units?'
Not Communist. Drug-dealer units. There was even a joke from George Carlin clear back in the early '70s about how funny it was to think of the PTA lady borrowing "a kilo" of sugar. "You want a lid of bologna with that?"
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@RaceProUK said:
It wouldn't surprise me if it's a case of 'Whah would we wanna use Cahmmunist units?'
Not Communist. Drug-dealer units. There was even a joke from George Carlin clear back in the early '70s about how funny it was to think of the PTA lady borrowing "a kilo" of sugar. "You want a lid of bologna with that?"
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419308/terrible-candidate-terrible-idea-any-metric-jim-geraghty
You know what comes in “kilos”? Drugs. Every other line of dialogue from Edward James Olmos’s Lieutenant Castillo on Miami Vice featured his gravelly voice tersely announcing how many kilos were being moved in the upcoming drug deal or how many kilos had been found at the bust.
http://c8.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/uploaded/LT Castillo.jpg
Look at this man. He’s miserable, because he has to use the metric system all day.
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If you have to count on your fingers and toes to do measurements, you're at a disadvantage whether you have five toes or six.
True enough, But if you had six you might be more likely to count in base 12 than 10.
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Having five on each didn't stop the Babylonians counting in base-12. Well, not base-12, base-60. Which is divisible by 12.
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Having five on each didn't stop the Babylonians counting in base-12. Well, not base-12, base-60. Which is divisible by 12.
Yes, but we count in base 10. Because fingers.
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IIRC, the Babylonians used their knuckles to count with; in the four fingers, there are 12 in total. No idea what the thumb was used for though.
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IIRC, the Babylonians used their knuckles to count with; in the four fingers, there are 12 in total. No idea what the thumb was used for though.
Well I bet the Babylonians didn't have any issues with metric systems.
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Tapping the relevant knucke?
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Well it works to get up and mostly over, but it looks like the bull stopped too soon for the rodeo clown's trick to work. Based on the other things you need to do for that job I dunno if it would really count as a bad idea comparatively.
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Based on the other things you need to do for that job I dunno if it would really count as a bad idea comparatively.
That just points out an earlier bad idea.
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That is the obvious implication, thanks.
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True enough, But if you had six you might be more likely to count in base 12 than 10.
Oh, yes, I understood that. I was just making fun of it. You don't want to look too close at any ancient/traditional human system, because there's weirdness there. Or to put it another way, gee, aren't we fortunate we don't have thirteen fingers on each hand? And if we did, would thirteen still be an unlucky number?
Filed as: 26x26 times table
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In case someone denies app stores are filled with crap
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I don't think that's true (kids eat lots of coins that make their way out, for instance), but there's lots of bad things that can happen as they travel through the body.
Except in this case you've got 37 magnetic balls sticking together. That clump of bucky balls isn't coming out.
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I would say 'easier international trade', but that's likely already done in metric anyway. Other than that, NFC.
Depending on what's being shipped, some things are moved entirely in imperial, and some things are moved entirely in metric. Of course, that's discounting any weighing requirements at customs. Generally, (though not always) it depends on country of origin.
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100000 downloads?
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IIRC the bigger problem is if they're separated, such as someone eating them not all at once. Then they stick to each other from different segments of the intestines, pinch the lining, and don't move anymore.
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Then they stick to each other from different segments of the intestines, pinch the lining, and don't move anymore.
Them not moving any more is the good outcome of that phenomenon.(The bad outcome involves the word "perforation"...)
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Which is inevitable once they pinch the lining.
They'll crush the blood out of whatever is in the pinch, slowly killing it, and migrate through it as it dies.
Ouch.
Metrication in the United States - Wikipedia
