Not of bread alone lives man…. I seem to remember someone saying that. Yes, the follow up was about religion, but the point remains. “Not of bread alone lives man.”
It’s weirdly easier to ignore that in our super-affluent era. You’d think that people scrabbling to survive in a world that yielded subsistence a handful of grain and a quarter cup of oil at a time would be more focused on the material, the absolutely needed to keep alive. But no. People in those circumstances were aware of the need for religion, for dream,for a vision of the past and the future for them and their kind.
Possibly this was because the present frankly didn’t offer them much to anesthetize themselves with. Therefore they needed to know the slog they were going through today counted towards the welfare of the future. Either their own welfare in heaven, or their children and grandchildren better lives here on Earth.
And then we took care of the basic needs, and yes, science is magnificent at that. Or science was, at the level that it improved food production, and travel, and medicine. I don’t want this to be understood as my saying science isn’t important. Science is. It’s just that science isn’t the WHOLE THING.
Let me explain: I’m writing this at noon (during my (eh) lunch hour,) on Wednesday. Having protested the whole version of “the right gave up on the culture, and that’s why the left dominates everything”, I was attacked by a blast from the past from early cold war days (or pure stupidity. I report, you decide.) And then I chose violence. Real word violence. The words “take a flying leap” were used in reply type of violence.
The poster deserved it because he answered our — mild — dispute on whether the right gave up on the arts and culture or not by going all “America after the Sputnik”:
Note, unlike the artist, I am actually posting this with the guy’s xit with his name and user handle, because frankly he deserves to be famous for that piece of incandescent stupidity.
There are so many things wrong with that post it’s not even in the right universe. Let me put on the hazmat suit and dissect it.
“You’re both full of crap” obviously and clearly translates as: I don’t give a flying fig what you two are talking about, because I don’t like art, I’m not interested in art, and I want to prove all the bad stereotypes about the right by telling you not to do it.
My answer to this is ignore the idiot. He’s not representative. There are a few of them. In a population as large as ours, you’re going to find any number of people who simply don’t “hear the music.” Fine. Some of them are on the right. Some are on the left. They all have their uses. None of their uses should be setting policy for the rest of the country, because they simply have no clue. This is roughly akin to letting blind people set policy on colors. “This color thing you guys argue about is bullshit. I can’t see anything, and I never needed color. Let’s do away with this distraction. The only color allowed shall be grey.” Yeah.
“While you two shout at each other about THE ARTS, Chinese 8th graders are learning calculus.” Uh…. okay, then. This sounds like it should be an immensely important message, but in fact it’s just irrelevant bullshit. I mean, I can juxtapose too. “While you yell at us on twitter, space x is working on spaceships.” Or perhaps “While you stomp around screaming, people are watching Hollywood movies, because they have nothing else.” Or perhaps–
The point is an argument about whether the arts are or are not a thing that inheres on the left has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese 8th graders learning Calculus. In fact, Chinese eighth graders learning calculus has nothing to do with anything. Does the poster think if I and the other guy talking about art stopped talking about art Chinese eighth graders would stop learning calculus? American eighth graders would start learning calculus? (Hint, mine did, and I bet a lot of others do.) Science TM would win? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that this no-account writer and what appears to be a no-account artist arguing over whether the arts are ignored by the right had that kind of power. Apparently we can — and should — rewrite the world by choosing what we want to argue about. Someone tell me what I should argue with artists about to provide us with free energy and reverse aging! Enough farting around. We should “Argue to save the world”!
Stop rolling on the floor laughing. I’m sure the idiot was being VERY SERIOUS and posturing in the way he’s seen others posture. Which makes him very smart and important, people. You should ignore the fact it makes no sense.
The whole thing reminded me of a Portuguese anti-smoking campaign that had as its slogan “Read more, smoke less” despite the fact that most nicotine addicts can smoke quite well while reading. I keep wanting to scream back “Fiddle more, burn Rome less.”
This btw. doesn’t touch the fact that the claim that “Chinese eighth graders are learning calculus” is meaningless. Chinese eighth graders are very good at doing well in international competitions, partly because their whole culture is based on testing. But there is more to it than this. Chinese are totalitarians, which means they carefully choose the face they present to the world. So they will pick the best students. I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that given the infection of DEI in our culture, the people we’ve sent to international testing are a variety of colors, and any number of them arrived in the country two weeks ago and are uncertain what they’re even being asked to do.
Point being: Stop paying attention to totalitarian propaganda. This is like telling me that the Chinese are building aircraft carriers. And ignoring the fact those are made of pot metal and tear like tissue paper.
At least the aircraft carriers thing makes sense, as in the military buildup of China can mean something in a potential war with the US. The calculus thing is tangential. Yes, we do need kids (and more importantly adults) who can do math in order to win wars or simply to maintain civilization.
But none of that a) has anything to do with how early you learn it, or how well you do in international competitions b) all the received knowledge in the world doesn’t make you a scientific powerhouse. c) even if you gave each kid in the US an excellent scientific education, with emphasis on the sciences and nothing else, it doesn’t mean America would thrive as a result. (We know that, because we did it. Put a pin in it for later.)
The thing about a) and b) is how many years this browbeating has been going on. Before I was born, we heard all about how the USSR did so much better in the sciences and that’s why America would lose the cold war. And yet, almost all scientific innovations come from the US with a not-insignificant trickle from Israel and a smaller trickle from Europe. The science-derived things that change the world and the way we live come from America. Part of it is that, as my friend Dave Freer once put it, America’s primary and secondary education suck but our tertiary is excellent. He was right (sort of) at the time, but now that our universities — INCLUDING STEM PROGRAMS (put a pin on this too) have been thoroughly corrupted, it is important to point out our DIY education, our ability to reinvent ourselves, and our relative ability to try and fail or succeed are still unequaled in the world.
Let me translate that: there are third acts in American lives. There are often fourth and fifth acts. … I know that our economy has been getting progressively restricted and entrepreneurship and invention limited, and in the last four years even more so, as people with saws ran around cutting off the legs of those who stood out. BUT we’re still possibly the only country in the world in which your life course isn’t set at 17 or so, for the rest of your life.
In America, if you didn’t learn Calculus in eighth grade, you can learn it at 30, in your free time, online, using one of the MIT free courses. And if you need it for that thing you want to invent and create, you very well will. Which means that it’s more directed. Sure, not everyone learns calculus, and then 99.9% go on to never use it, but those who need to learn calculus can learn it ala carte and cheaply when they need it.
Or put another way: my people, who are mostly the ones who are likely to create something (And to be rightly understood by “my people” I mean those who don’t fit in, who are just Odd, who spend their lives trying to understand, make, think, even as the rest of the world looks at them like they lost their minds. Call us Odds. Or pink monkeys. Or goats. My people) are always learning or trying to learn something, their entire lives, limited only by money and time and the number of hoops they’re made to jump through to acquire knowledge. In America, those are minimized. Right now my ability to (re?)learn ancient Greek is being hampered by health and lack of time, but I have an Oxford-packaged course on my desk as we speak. (And another course on game theory because I have a feeling it will help understand the cultural context we’re living through.)
To demand that we teach calculus to every eighth grader regardless of ability, interest, or whether they crossed the border yesterday is to subscribe to the totalitarian model of education and human society, in which everyone moves through stages of knowledge and training at the same ages, the “best” (and usually most highly conforming) ones are picked for the best training and posts, and your life is set at 17. This might have been the best way when your professional life was done by 60, your “climbing” professionally was done by 45, and the world was fairly static. This hasn’t been true in America since the 70s, at least. Probably before. And the only reason it’s “true” in the rest of the world is that they’re being artificially held back by their kraptastic systems of government.
A society with increasing numbers of healthy and productive eighty year olds would be stupid to set your course in life at 17. Count in your head how many people you know who are in their second, third or fourth careers and who have finally got where they’re meant to be.
Freedom is a choice, and it affects everything. Stop trying to regiment our education to compete with imaginary milestones. I agree our kids are being taught a bunch of idiocy and not learning how to read/write/do math. But the answer is not “more regimented top down education.” That’s how we got here. The answer is to free parents/others to teach people — not just children — as much as possible. OUTSIDE regimentation.
Now, remember that pin? After Sputnik, America panicked that they were losing the education game to the soviets. The answer was to emphasize STEM. We’d show the reds we were better by being more regimented and learning more sciences. Nothing but the sciences. Everything else was unimportant.
Which left an entire generation open to Soviet propaganda, selling them a rotten vision of their own land and their own system. And that is exactly how we got here.
Top down arguably doesn’t ever work very well in education, nor does one size fits all. Take languages: everyone who became an exchange student with me had learned English. Some of them, being rich and attending private schools, had learned it from kindergarten. On the plane over, we found out that I who had learned English for all of two years, as a guilty pleasure, was the only one who understood the stewardesses. I spent a sleepless night, translating for everyone. In the states, in turn, I found that those countries in which English was taught from kindergarten were slightly better. The Scandinavians could at least get along in the basics. But their attempts at conversation with the natives were actually less fluent than mine…
No, I’m not bragging. I’m pointing out I did well at it because I had an interest. You’re more likely to find people fluent in English in Europe now and it has nothing to do with school learning. It has to do with interest and this thing we call the internet, where they need to know English to communicate with the (eh) natives.
Interest drives learning. It’s always like that.
But beyond that, this training of everyone in STEM and only STEM because “STEM + Medical improves lives” leaves you open to cultural bullshit.
Because humans aren’t machines. Sure, there is “how men fight” (and women too) but there’s also “Why men fight.” In the two world wars, there were entertainers sent over seas and men painted cuties on the nose of their planes. On the hottest edges of tech innovation, right now, people are driven by visions. Musk (whom we imported, because America is not limited to ITS OWN 8th graders) is driving space travel and a whole lot of related science because he wants to go to Mars, not “because science.” He has a vision of humanity as a multi-planetary species, and that’s why he and those who are attracted by his vision work and create.
If you educate people excellently in science but don’t give them a “why” they’ll come up with “whys” and some of them will be imposed by the enemy, toxic and corrosive. The generation of the sixties, fed on STEM, had nothing to oppose Soviet puerile slogans and claims of superiority. The degradation of the culture can be laid squarely on the feet of that obsession combined with the left’s playing gatekeeper and keep away for everyone to the right of Lenin.
And it didn’t even work. Do you know anyone who did great things in STEM by being relentlessly pushed towards “STEM ONLY!”? I don’t. But I do know any number of people working in things from medicine to space who were brought there by the novels of Robert A. Heinlein.
Novels. Entertainment. And granted, a lot of his novels had state-of-the-art science. But by the time I came along, the science was outdated. The vision, the hope still drove me to love them and drove a lot of people to real science.
Meanwhile, the people pushed to STEM but not given a reason turn into bitter functionaries and hold on to “received science” as a religion. Not to evoke the unholy name of Fauci, but Fauci. And he is unfortunately the flowering of a trend. By the oughts the left was pushing into STEM with both feet. We got racially inclusive math and other insanity. Because if you don’t allow people to have a vision of what to work for, evil idiots will invent one and then subjugate those who have none.
Science is unglamorous and a lot of work. It’s also very important. But to work through the unglamorous, slogging parts people need something to drive them: the vision of a free future; the vision of humans living better and more happy/healthy lives; the vision of humanity as a multi-star species.
You can sell that vision via preaching and propaganda. Your buy-in will be small, and a lot of people will rebel. (Though in the totalitarian countries you won’t see much of the real rebellion. (Not that it doesn’t exist. You just won’t see it.) )The end result will be meh.
Or you can let those creatives who are not suited to STEM do their thing. (these things are hereditary, guys. Some of us in the commentariat pushed our kids HARD towards STEM and now in middle life 2/3 of them have escaped in the direction of arts and culture. Note I’m not saying that we’re not capable of science. I loved engineering. But for various reasons, we ended up working in the culture wars, arguably because that’s where we belonged. There are reasons for it. And those reasons will apply to a lot of our kids too.) .
Let people work and create and learn and live according to their inclinations. In the end, freedom and competition are the answer: nationally and internationally, in arts, in science, in everything.
Work at making training more easily available and opportunities more abundant. The rest will shake itself out and we’ll have the best science AND the best art.
Competition between the two was always a false dichotomy.
Put your helmet on. Go. Learn, create, invent. Explain, create, imagine. Art or science? Who cares? Everyone in the scrum. Everyone do what he/she is best at. May the best ones win. For the good of humanity. (And our destiny in the stars.)
According To Hoyt 
I’ve seen anti-smoking campaigns that made me want to take up smoking. Mostly by Truth, but not all.
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There’s also the anti-whatever campaigns that ended up sending the message “Do Not Do This Cool Thing” (not linking to TV Tropes, you can DDG that phrase and find the TV Tropes page yourself if you want to spend 3-4 hours on a wikiwalk).
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Anti-drug efforts – during “Miami Vice”.
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I try not to hate things, but those “Truth” ads give me, “burn with the fire of 1000 suns,” urges. And I don’t smoke and never have smoked.
Again, I seem to be developing a bad allergy toward repurposed19th-century Temperance ads. (I have a book of “school dialogues,” from the 1800s, and the whole, “Product X is made with filthy, filthy ingredients and will make you unclean and unfit for decent society,” message goes back at least that far).
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If you use the Russian “Pravda” for “Truth”, it works -much- better.
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I could do so much better, for sure. One of them is to emphasize the short term benefits of quitting, because focusing on long-term benefits or abstract numbers doesn’t work. Another method is to allow incrementalism. Sure, go to vaping. Vaping isn’t great, but you’re cutting down the toxic substances from 60+ to two or three, that’s a huge improvement.
Lung cancer is awful and we could cut the rates by 85% if everybody quit smoking. (The other 15% is environmental or genetic.) But I want the carrot, not the stick.
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In Oregon, Those Superior to the Masses have decided that vaping is as evil as smoking, so while it’s not banned (for adults), it’s classed as Doubleplusungood and lumped with cigarettes. As Insty noted, one of the uses for vaping is to wean people off cancer sticks, and making it difficult to get rather defeats that purpose. Sigh.
(Quit smoking some time in 1983. Even today, I’m seeing the non-carcinogenic fallout from 13 years of smoking. So far my lungs are OK, [waggles hands–allergies make life interesting] but it’s something to pay attention to.
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How much tax revenue do the anti-vapers get from the folks addicted to cigs?
Just asking a question.
It’s a metric shitload of money they would lose if folks got off tobacco, right?
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And yet, smoking weed is fine and good for you. even though the problems of smoke are the same for everything.
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Soma!
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Unless you’re allergic to hemp or marijuana smoke. Then it’s worse.
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well, yes, and it might be another reason that I was so ill in CO. BUT they think it’s good for you.
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“…they think…”
Ummm…I’ll need to see evidence for that assertion…😉
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I never quite understood how it seemed to be the same people trying to legalize Marijuana and demonize tobacco.
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They don’t want the competition?
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Burning hippy leaf good!
Burning southron leaf bad!
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Soon to be great niece is at an alternative charter school (Willamette Leadership Academy) because of vaping. Mom (niece) vapes to stay off of cigarettes, plus I think it is a delivery system for one of her prescription medicines (POTS, among other problems). Three strikes and you are not only kicked out of your school but the district. She had two strikes. She was bored (go figure) and acting out at the school. Much happier at the alternative school. Things turned around at home too. She was pushing to meet bio-sperm *donor (not, not, not in this world happening, ever), which has stopped.
(*) May he never get out of prison. His other juvenile children (a few months to 7 years older half siblings with almost as many mothers as kids, their mothers, and niece who was beaten, were victims, but great-niece was too young at the time). Serial abuser, full range. Great-niece was a few weeks old when sister and BIL and nieces were able to pry niece and great-niece out of his clutches. Wasn’t very long before everything caught up with him. One of the five year olds presented physical signs to a must report authority.
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One of the things that killed my brother was COPD (he abused tobacco, alcohol and cocaine, at least). He was a complete invalid, and profoundly depressed, by age 60.
I’m glad I don’t have to smell burning tobacco, but I don’t have the urge to campaign against it.
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I’m not so sure those Chinese aircraft carriers can do a very good job of military force projection anywhere in the world. I suspect that their sole purpose is to project force against Taiwan.
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They could deal with Taiwan and the expected intervention of USN forces with land based air and their land-based ballistic and cruise antiship missiles.
The current PLAN CVs are to bully the neighborhood out to their second island chain, so Japan, The Philippines, Indonesia and Australia. If they wanted to contest the entire Pacific and the Indian Ocean like the IJN did, the PLAN would need a more robust logistics tail. They are building a lot of smaller surface ships with longer legs that add to their antisub capabilities, so that says they recognize the real threat asset in WESTPAC
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Which is leading to “Japan, The Philippines, Indonesia and Australia” having joint military exercises. Think about it. Less than a 100 years after WWII the latter 3 playing nice with Japan. WWII is still remembered. The soldiers who fought, may be gone. But the children who were there, the grandchildren who sat at their parents and grandparents knees to hear the true horror stories are not. They won’t be for a long time. It will be another few generations before what Japan did is “history”. Heck it has been over 100 years since the subjugation of the American natives (Canada/US/Mexico/etc.). Have they forgotten? Heck no. Every generation there have been reminders. “Never Forget” is the slogan from the atrocities against the Jewish and other European populations targeted by the Nazis, but it definitely is not limited to the actions against them, and time.
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Yep. And there are a lot of Americans with Japanese ancestry who do not look favorably on the government for violating their Constitutional rights by seizing their stuff and herding them into concentration camps. And I wouldn’t blame them one damn bit. That’s one thing I don’t hold against George Takai, and may explain why he’s a bit of a nut.
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We can certainly point out that “It was the Democrats” that KZed US citizens, the Republican party didn’t exactly resist it very much.
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Nah. He’s a nut because actor.
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The first two Chinese carriers are moderate ranged, IIRC, but use the ski jump launch style. So they can’t launch planes with heavy strike load outs. The third carrier is a CATOBAR carrier like US carriers (though non-nuclear), but there are hints that their EM catapult is doing even worse than the one on the Ford is doing. The fourth carrier is supposed to add the nuclear reactor so that they’ll have a proper super carrier that can rival the Nimitzes and Fords, presumably with a carrier plane capable of carrying a large strike load out.
However, as FM notes, the PLAN escort ships have range problems. All but the most recent are basically coastal defense vessels due to the range. Last I checked, they only had one escort-type ship with range, and it would fill the same slot as the cruiser in a CVN battle group. They still need smaller ships with range for the battle group perimeter roles
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“aircraft carrier” is one of the most complex things Humanity had ever deployed.
Because “carrier” really “carrier battle group” or its just a show of prestige and a Navy Cross to the first gunner to spot it.
Carrier
planes
crew
epic pile of experience and know-how
escorts
loggies
more crew
more epic pile of experience and know-how
dockside support and maintenance
yet more crew
yet more epic pile of experience and know-how
hey more loggies!
And finally, epically, and more than you think: cubic parsecs of money
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We broke the Soviet Union with rocketry and an SDI research program.
Can we break the ChiComs by drawing them into a carrier escalation duel?
Help every little Podunk potentiate in their AO to deploy a carrier, even if its a merchantman with a flat top and six crop dusters. (our old “escort carrier” design form WW2). Watch China have to match them and us for Face. Make sure the folks in China know just how much the CCP is spending on their folly.
Just the idea of Japan with a Nimitz equivalent probably gave the Japan Navy folks a need for looser trousers.
Maybe we can sell a couple of “escort carriers” to Taiwan.
Then, start popping SSNs up in the middle of the PLAN exercises. Whoopsie.
Heh.
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A Chinese ship with a nuclear reactor. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
I’d be more inclined to think they’d sail it into a harbor, and have it sink and leak as a means of massive sabotage.
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Any decent “large container ship” does the job rather cheaply, especially if most containers are packed full of big and small rocks, gravel, and sand, plus random chunks of ferrous scrap, and some are heavily mined and boobytrapped. The more you screw with it, the worse it gets.
Folks can imagine all sorts of interesting things to place in a few odd containers, to liven up the mix.
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And they work well at knocking down bridges.
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Story to illustrate English-learning: a German who fled parts of German-speaking Czechoslovakia during WWII, ended up in East Germany post war. He was mandated to learn Russian as a second language starting really early in school. Later, the family fled to West Germany. There, English was the mandated second language. He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t learn it.
Then, one day, he told someone his dream was to fly aircraft. They were near an airport or military base so he saw the planes a lot and began to dream.
He was then told that if he wanted to be a pilot, he had to know English. Suddenly his English-learning skills improved dramatically.
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I wanted to read SF that hadn’t been translated ;)
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When I was a teenager, I read a book in which the author (Korner? my memory says that he was a Maths professor) argued against the teaching of a certain practice/technique. (The book is still at my parents’ house so I’m going completely on memory here.)
His argument finished with the line “Maths should be taught because it is useful or because it is interesting. It is no longer useful. It was never interesting.”
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Math “was never interesting”? Yeah? Well, y’know, that’s just, like, his opinion, man.
… Says the guy who took Calculus I in 11th grade, then went to the local junior college to take Calculus II and III during 12th grade. I loved it.
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Oh, wait, I think I misread that. He was saying that particular technique was no longer useful and was never interesting. My mistake. As Emily Litella would say, “Never mind.”
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Even then some math techniques are like zombies and return from the dead. Matrix Math was an obscure field. However it was perfect for expressing quantum physics, later it became the main tactic (in the form of 4×4 homogeneous matrices) for doing 3d projection for computer graphics. Similarly Eulers method for solving integrals and similar was generally ignored as a historical oddity due to the sheer difficulty of the repetitive calculations. That is until the 50’s when we needed to mesh certain equations of motion for orbits and landings which did not have known analytical solutions. It didn’t hurt that digital computers were coming on the scene and could do the large amounts calculations to reduce the error bounds on an Euler’s approximation.
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It IS interesting. Among the courses waiting for me to have time (yes, I do know I need to make time. I’m almost at the point I can see it from here) are math courses, because it IS interesting. And it’s always useful.
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They are not pushing “STEM”. They are pushing academia, credentialism, and the resultant indoctrination of UltraHardLeftroid idiocy.
“We need more credentialed dipsticks and sweeeeeet Federal grantGravy.”
No.
We need -less- government meddling. The rewards for real inventing are -huge-, provided we keep the taxman and the regulatory kudzus pruned back.
And as to China’s shipbuilding, they have biggish ships with big flat decks. Until they learn the huge and complex art of managing them, they are big expensive showboats, not “aircraft carriers”. They will learn, given time, but its not just putting pilots and planes on a flat floater.
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As my Bubble Head friends would say, nice big targets.
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c4c
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As you’ve mentioned before our current education system was founded to support and emulate a mass-production widget factory model. Which was easily redirected to attempt mass-production of statist voter widgets.
Like much in our society this is changing, kicking and screaaming, but changing. When the heavy hand of Elmer Fed is removed from our backs, self-education is going to go exponential. This will be one of the real impacts of AI–a tutor that will teach you and test you again and again. But it’s available even without AI and that availability will increase.
Because the industry model has changed. There is still going to be mass production, but there is also going to be very local custom production via additive manufacturing. The latter requires much more adaptation and mental agility in its practice and an education system to support it.
But we need time to adapt. MAGA, MAHA, and Trump are really about getting this time: cut the government, cut the debt, stop the current wars, prevent ww3, etc. It will take time for all the cultural poison to work its way out of the system, to reindustrialize, and to return to being Americans ready to charge and change the future.
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As I mentioned on twitter, I do find it hilarious that the Russian mathematicians with the greatest impacts also seem to be the ones that the Soviet leadership ignores or forgot about.
Like the Russian mathematician who published, in a public international journal, how to directly compute surfaces for defeating radar…
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Supposedly some Soviet era journals about astrophysics had a few articles/papers that were interesting in a way to astrophysicists and even more interesting to folks doing fusion on earth. And not the tokamak type.
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Just because someone in the U.S. read that paper, had an “aha!” moment, and used that papers theoretical work to develop practical methods that computers of the day could use to predict radar returns from the surfaces of an aircraft, thus ultimately enabling design of the F-117 stealth fighter and associated radar absorbent materials… nah, the USSR was a world leader in science, so everything must by definition be fine…
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The only place where the Russians were ahead of the USA in anything was in fiction, or propaganda, and don’t forget our spies helped that propaganda to keep their jobs.
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NOT in novels, though. Gosh that was a slog.
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First “stealth” plane was the British Mosquito, built of mostly wood. German radar couldn’t really see it. Total accident.
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It was basically plywood, glue, and paint, it’s what made them so maneuverable plus they had six twenty mm in the nose. It was pretty amazing design wise.
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Well, and two Rolls Royce Merlin 12 cylinder engines, which unlike in the mass-produced US Packard form, we’re loving hand crafted with files and shims so they fit together properly. Still, two of the beasts in a not-really-that-heavy, very slippery airframe, able to serve either as a heavy fighter or as a bomber delivering the payload of a B-17 with only a crew of three.
A few are still flying. Here’s vid from inside of one:
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When the U.S. licensed the Merlin and Packard got the blueprints they were horrified at how badly the engine was optimized for mass production, and at how much hand fitting work each required. They set to redesigning things, and the resulting Packard Merlin was a vastly more producible and supportable engine in the U.S. Mustang.
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An interesting thing was the British approach to counterespionage. Not only scientists, engineers and mathematicians, but bibliophiles (with memories that could remember a similar letter among hundreds they had read). Also, chess players, musicians and artists (useful in decoding) because they would recognize patterns.
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Shortly after the Fall of the Wall, the company I worked for essentially hired the math department of Moscow (not Idaho) University as a division of our company.
They did quite a bit of interesting (applied to us) work for several years. The icing on the cake (for them) was periodic trips to the US to meet here at the Mothership, and also to go on spending excursions to Frys Electronics and to get Levi’s jeans to bring back home for presents where they’d do the most good.
This were different (and still much the same) back then.
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*Things* were different, things, not “this”…
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Thing is you can do both arts and STEM. I’ve been doing both over five decades. It is not either-or. (One reason I became an engineer was to fund my writing habit. That was just one. Mainly it was because in the1970s I felt engineering would drive change over the next 50 years and I wanted to be part of it.) So his argument is a non-sequitur. So let’s do both.
The only thing I ask is that you don’t lump the two together in that abomination called STEAM. Steam (as engineers know) is hot air, and STEAM is non-STEM educators trying to grift onto STEM efforts to encourage students to move into STEM fields. (Educators have been looking down their noses at engineers since I was in high school. My high school counselor tried discouraging me from going into engineering and going into the liberal arts instead. I told him I would rather major in engineering than history because of my love of history. The engineers were going to be making history, not the historians and at 18 I wanted to make history, not just write about it.)
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Obviously you can and should do both. Attempts to pen your mind in are attempts to control you.
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Re: looking down noses at engineers and others. See Kipling’s “The Sons of Martha”. It’s been going on a long time.
(Recalls heated discussion with HS advisor when I (college track, occasionally honors student) insisted on taking drafting and metal shop. I won. Used both, during and after electrical engineering career.)
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Four years of Wood Shop.
Mom got the various furniture she could not afford.
I ensured I had spare ways to earn money, and added greatly to my “handyman” skills. (Which have proven uber-useful over and over, no matter what my current career or lifestyle.)
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“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” – W.W. Smith, via RAH.
😉👍👍
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That’s good thinking for 18: I was only mildly curious about history but I wanted to write I majored in English with a MilSci minor from the ROTC department thinking that’d give me a career to fund the writing by.
So the Army made me an engineer. And then a historian. But I think another Hand was at work behind it.
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That’s good thinking for 18: I was only mildly curious about history but I wanted to write I majored in English with a MilSci minor from the ROTC department thinking that’d give me a career to fund the writing by.
So the Army made me an engineer. And then a historian. But I think another Hand was at work behind it.
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That’s good thinking for 18: I was only mildly curious about history but I wanted to write I majored in English with a MilSci minor from the ROTC department thinking that’d give me a career to fund the writing by.
So the Army made me an engineer. And then a historian. But I think another Hand was at work behind it.
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Ethics may be an ‘art’, but STEM students really need those courses almost as much as they require logic courses.
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And where do I advocate STEM students not take those courses? Engineering ethics was a requirement for graduation from the University of Michigan College of Engineering in the 1970s. As were literature courses, economics, writing, and a distribution of humanities classes.
You didn’t get closer to the classic “well rounded education” than graduating with an engineering degree in the 1970s. Engineers had to take languages, humanity, composition as well as science, engineering and mathematics. Liberal Arts majors literally got degrees without college math and with science classes on par with “rocks for jocks” taken by varsity athletes.
STEAM is a scam used by humanities faculty to tap into STEM money without the requirement to understand science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
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I’m going to back this. The humanities in school are SO screwed up, you’d best go it alone.
I always tell new writers “First, don’t get a degree in creative writing.”
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I tell them the same thing. The irony is I have degrees in Engineering and Business Administration and a sister-in-law has an MFA in creative writing and I am the one getting published. Not Larry Correia’s A List. More like H list or I list. Still, I really feel avoiding creative writing degrees, especially on the graduate level, is important to success.
A business degree is good prep for writers, especially the MBA. You learn how to research, analyze facts, and write effectively. Plus, it teaches you the business side of writing.
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Every engineer I know has an arts/humanities/etc hobby.
The reverse… is not true.
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Sometimes it is. Coff.
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Well, yes.
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STEAM-Punk
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Beautifully written, and timely. Also, this is the first place I’ve ever belonged to–Odds. People really truly like me. Joy.
Just having arrived back at “elevation zero” or close to it, I’m eating yogurt that froze in the ghetto motor hotel frig, with havarti cheese and honey crisp apples. Drinking fresh coffee from my own pot that was jerry rigged to a power outlet so it would work. I have never been happier in my life–or, maybe, I just can’t remember being happier.
As far as the argument goes–my answer is to go dance in the lobby, in “their” lobby, laugh at their silliness and pomposity they’ve shoved in my gob since time began, and paint a rainbow on the wall. (Saw one so huge in Eastern WA on my way home yesterday it took up half the sky.)
Odds are the ones who will right the ship of culture, as long as we keep shoving their stupidity back in their faces so we can draw pictures on the wall, and write our stories, and pet the cats who just want to stop the hotel gigs and get into the new crib.
Blessings to all!
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I’m do happy to hear you are happy.
it’s early, but this will make my whole day!
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your joy adds to mine!
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Wait a minute…you found a hotel room fridge that was ACTUALLY CAPABLE of freezing something? Fortune is indeed smiling upon you, even if the only thing it froze was your yogurt.
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the gods have truly smiled on this move, this has never happened before
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We ran into a hotel fridge that froze stuff. Of coarse what it froze, and subsequently exploded (at 2 AM), wasn’t actually in the freezer section, and shouldn’t be frozen (soda).
Like a gun went off, multiple times (4 exploded). Being in a hotel in Canada, gun was not our first thought (although it was Banff, so possible).
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Our last hotel freezer, in TN, was warmer than the car in the parking lot at night. :D
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Gives quiet prayer of thanks for the suites hotel in Medford. Started going there once Covidiocy hit full Demon-crat levels, and started using the fridge for the very hot Costco chickens. They do a lot better without the 2 hour hot trip, so I buy them the first day in town, stick them in the fridge and take them home cold.
This is one of the Homewood Suites–part of the Hilton chain, and largely family oriented. Used to go to the Hilton next door (easy walking distance to my retina surgeon’s office, since driving while dilated isn’t a great idea), but Feb ’20, it was clear they knew Something Nasty This Way Comes. (Kate did the lockdowns mid March.) Had to go a few months later, and started with the suites. Maybe 20 bucks cheaper, and once the brownbag breakfasts ended (full of stuff that make me deathly ill), a breakfast as part of the deal, so effectively $30 cheaper per day. Plus I can roll my own lunch and dinner, or play gluten roulette and hit a restaurant. (Lost last time. This trip, it’s food from home for dinner.)
Before last year’s renovations were complete, minor things were flaky. Garbage disposals failed a couple times, and the wall-remote for the heater was wonky, but I could work around both. Post renovation, it seems everything is dialed in.
(ISO standard refrigerator, small, maybe 14 cubic feet, but big enough, and with a usable freezer. Don’t need much, I chill the blue-icepacks. No oven beyond microwave, and a two-burner cooktop. The coffeemaker uses pods. I use one per day, then do another with instant. Good enough. )
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Can you cull two of those triplicate comments I just dropped, above, bitte schöne? WPDE.
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To be fair, it did freeze overnight there. Our fridge (in the same hotel) froze Bugbear’s drinks.
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A stupid thing about this person’s Calculus statement is that the Chinese also have artists. Maybe not with the freedom we have in the West, but you can respect their talent and admire their work.
And art and science aren’t mutually exclusive. Let’s take Tom Sholz, founder of the group Boston. Not only an inventor with a technical background, he composed one of the best albums in rock history with a unique sound. Add a awesome lead singer and a few mates, it’s applied musical engineering combined with vision for soul and the soundtrack of many a party. (Cue “Foreplay / Long Time”)
And the flip side is true. One of the best programmers I know has a music degree and is a jazz drummer and bassist. Didn’t get into programming until he started working in a studio and playing with MIDI and computers.
Shoving people down the STEM track doesn’t work if they aren’t interested and have no passion for the field. I have two friends with math degrees who are as sharp as can be that would rather be a vet tech or in marketing respectively.
Or my spouse, who is scary talented and could be an epic engineer if she wanted to be, is happier in a role that involves people instead of code and electronics. She can also crochet one-off crazy creations that blow away her friends. She did earn her Extra Class amatuer radio license in two weeks just so she could get a cute callsign…
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I remember ‘music critics’ in the 80’s saying “Every Boston song sounds the same. They have no originality!”
I got their first album in 1976. NOBODY had ever heard anything like that before. People couldn’t get enough of ‘the Boston sound’. Including the band, apparently.
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One of my favorite bands of the last few years — Starset, a creative blend of pop, synth, and even some metal stylings on a solid base of rock music — is led by a guy who got a master’s in electrical engineering and then decided the one thing he wanted above all was to make music.
Me, I appreciate science and engineering, but I have zero desire to work in either field; I loathe doing math, and working for an engineering company has shown me that it’s a profession that truly would drive me insane. Instead, I’m the guy who puts the cool things they’re doing into words that advertise said things to everyone else. It’s the closest to STEM I’m ever going to get, and I love it. :)
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My father got his Doctorate in Music right before the bottom dropped out of the education field, and no one could afford to hire him. So he went into computer science and worked at the Kresge corporation, and then McDonnell Douglas.
Eventually he went back into teaching in the computer science field, still with the title Doctor, but his students probably didn’t know it was in the wrong field.
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Worked with a computer savant. He also played concert quality piano. Music and math are not mutually exclusive. In fact no art and math are mutually exclusive.
I’ve said it before. My programming ability and success, and I am neither a programming nor mathematical savant, is directly related to my ability to suss out and remember patterns. Apply mathematical solution to those patterns? Oh, heck no. But I could code them. I could find the problem and fix the problem when they came up. I can do the math. I just can’t devise the math to any pattern.
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Piano teacher here: yep, pattern recognition is one of the main factors in how fast my students learn to read and play music!
Sadly, my brain doesn’t translate between math and music, though I can see the connections theoretically.
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I have a BA in Music, and a Master of Music degree – have never earned money with them, tho I did play in a few community orchestras and was Concert Mistress for three seasons in the last one, up in WA.
I started in IT as a data entry operator, aka keypuncher. Grabbed the opportunity to do OJT for programming, and spent the next 22 years as a computer systems analyst/programmer, for three different companies over the years.
The music degrees were my credentials to get into programming – they wanted college graduates, any field would do. ;-)
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“music degrees were my credentials to get into programming – they wanted college graduates, any field would do.”
What I figured with the first 4 year degree. So when I changed careers I did jump start the learning to program with community college classes. Oh, who am I kidding. I went back for accounting. Why not? Between Mt St Helens and the Owl, my original career went poof (not the only forester who turned programmer or IT). Figured if couldn’t stay doing what I wanted, do what was easy. Trust me, at a minimum, basic accounting is easy for me (ended my career writing and supporting an accounting program. Cost Accounting, and the concepts were not hard, despite being told “it would take awhile to understand”. Nope. Hardest part? Never worked with the programming tool being used.) Advisor tried then to talk me in programming. Lets just say my very first programming class 5 years later was less than successful (as it it was horrible, dang teletypes). Had to take a computer class. Difference between 1976 and 1983. I loved the class. What made me get the CS bachelors? First employer wanted the credentials. Hey company paid for the university level classes, at least until they left town. By then, almost done, so finished. Did it help? Well, yes, at least through ’90s. If having one 4 year degree is good, having two was better.
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Well the bold enlarged quote is weird. None of the formatting was available. Just quoted the sentence from prior comment.
Oh on the Cost Accounting? The only definition I had to ask about was “Use Tax”. Why? Raised and live in Oregon. We don’t have Sales or Use Tax. However, most the clients were Washington and California. Had fun with that every time the states changed their sales tax rates. “What’s that?” with “You do know where we are based? Right?” It was an easy setting for them to get to. Just hard to remember when they didn’t change it but every two or 3 years.
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Good engineers want to get their hands dirty.
Good doctors want to get their hands dirty.
Good scientists what to play “What if?” with real stuff (they usually know better to get their hands actually in contact with said stuff.)
And good technologists have been getting their hands dirty forever.
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Yep. First you design it. Then you build (hands-on as much as possible) the breadboard/prototype. Repeat those until it works. Then, unless it’s a one-off, you turn it over to manufacturing, making sure they don’t “fix” it so it’s easier to produce (and doesn’t work as designed). The last usually also involves hands-on time, preferably on the process, not on the manufacturing manager.😉
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Modern circuits often don’t work as breadboards. High frequencies, critical timing and impedances, signal isolation, etc. Part of designing your widget is laying out the PCB. That’s engineering, not production.
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True. Some of the breadboarding I was referring to included both gate arrays and PWA layout, both of which were produced by vendors as prototypes to our design and sent to us for evaluation and test. And usually revised as needed before we finalized the designs. Most of our non-PWA boards were wire-wrap, used where timing and impedance matching weren’t critical; those we did ourselves in-house. It was the fabrication of systems using both where most of the “hands-on” part occurred, although engineering management tried, mostly in vain, to make us leave all that to the lab techs. Most of what I worked on were radar test systems, usually in quantities of a dozen or fewer. And all this was prior to my retirement in ’06.
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My reply seems to have fallen into the bit bucket. I’ll wait and see if it shows up. WPDE. With prejudice.
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No? OK, I’ll try again.
The breadboarding and prototyping I referred to involved PWA and gate array design and layout, with the preliminary sent out to a fab shop to be built for evaluation. When we got it back we did further testing an modification until it worked as desired; the usual process for any breadboard ot prototype. Only then was it finalized and sent to the fab shop (or if large quantity, internal manufacturing) for final build. That’s if there were frequency and timing constraints; if there werent most of our work was using planar arrays and wire-wrap, wich we did entirely in the group. This was all for radar system test sets, with quantities from 4 or 5 up to about 60 or so; not bulk numbers. We also designed and built RF assemblies, up to about 3GHz; no PWAs or other boards involved other than as controllers, which had no real timing or frequency constraints. The design/development process was about the same.
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So they’re both now here. Thanks, Sarah, for breaking them out of WP jail.😊👍👍
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The light opera group I’m associated with has a live orchestra. Just about everybody in that orchestra has a science job. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that’s how they were recruited: “Hey, I know a few good instrumentalists in my department, let’s see if there are more!”
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“He’s got a daytime job.
He’s doing alright.” :)
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It took me a month, though I started from scratch. (And 22 years working as an EE, but…) I was encouraged to go beyond the Tech level, and saw General wasn’t that hard, nor was Extra. Passed all three exams one night (a first for the testers) and got perfect scores on all three (yet another first).
Not terribly active; I bring up JS8Call, but beyond heartbeats, don’t do much in the way of contacts. I was thinking of it as a SHTF alternative, and now that the chances are a bit lower, haven’t gotten into the chatting/ragchew. One of these days, I suspect.
I’ve been horribly shy at times, and it takes me time to get into things. OTOH, I volunteered to be president of a model-engine builder’s club for a couple of years when the first president bailed. So, it can be defeated.
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Despite reading a book a day and a (former) subscriber to Denver Performing Arts Center, I’m an “arts, whatever” guy. I see both points of view. The problem I have is the binary/Manichean presentation. Embrace the power of “and”.
When young, I wanted to be a “scientist” (Tom Swift like inventor). When I went to college, I realized I was not as smart as I thought I was. I went with what I enjoyed (computers are not math!!!) and gave up on the scientist dream. I’ve never been that interested in doing art. I found Sarah via her “How to Write a Novel in 13 weeks” PJ Media column. It’s been 13 years and I still have not written one (lots of fragments on the hard-drive, though).
I’ve always thought that formal, lockstep education was a bad idea. I must admit that as I’ve gotten older, more structured learning (classes/courses as opposed to just reading books and figuring it out) has become more appealing. This is what I find most compelling about the post.
There is an argument to be made that everyone should know STEM basics (arithmetic, bacteria are thing, we’re in a solar system, etc…), but anything beyond that is much harder to justify (geometry, trig, calculus, molecular biology, astrophysics*, etc…). I think the same argument applies to the arts. It’s pretty easy to argue that everyone should see a play, listen to a variety of music (at least once), perhaps even be given the opportunity to at least fiddle with an instrument. Why the ancient Egyptians drew everyone in profile, why medieval artists had an entirely different conception of perspective, or when trumpets got valves? Not so much.
*People get all bent out of shape about FTL breaking causality, but no one cares that “now” is a meaningless concept? Get over it. If there is no “now”, why is broken causality an issue?
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I think people should know basic accounting for households and organizations before they learn calculus.
Being able to budget and read other’s budgets is a modest investment that will make you the one-eyed man in the Valley of the Blind.
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People end up finding their place and it’s not even talents, honestly. It’s what you keep feeling a need to do. or at least that’s been it for me.
Yes, sure, give the kids a good background in everything you can (and they’ll let you. They get a vote.) But don’t try to make them only one thing. That’s the way to create a lot of unhappy and less than good (even if adequate) workers.
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A little off topic but CBS News is “worried about Illegal Irish in Trump’s America”.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irish-immigrants-trump-america/
Two thoughts.
One, CBS is apparently thinking that “anti-Illegal Immigration” is Racist so we “might” be concerned about the fate of White Illegals.
Two, there’s the idea that “illegals” will do jobs that Legals/American Citizens won’t do. IE Work for less than “minimum wage”. Of course, people who know something about Small Business have known that raising the minimum wage would cause problems for Small Business. So these idiots are thinking that it’s OK to pay Illegals less than minimum wage.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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If they’re here illegally, they can go back to their home country too.
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Yep.
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Absolutely.
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That would probably help dear old Ireland with its own immigration problems. Especially if our friends in ICE can spin ’em up on The Dubliners and the Wolfe Tones all the way back over there, and issue every willing man of ’em a broad black brimmer and a little Armalite!
Let ’em pray St. Patrick’s Breastplate and drive the snakes BACK out of Ireland. A man can dream, at least, right?
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I was chewing on, batting around, and generally gnawing on the “science or art” thing, and I wonder: does this person believe that humans are purely material beings? If so, then only things that improve the physical existence matter – agronomy, medicine, better internet, and so on. But if people are more than organic machines, then arts of all kinds, literature of all kinds, those things are vital to a comfortable and satisfied existence.
Since atheists go to concerts, visit museums, read novels or history books or whatever floats their boats, and support parks, I think the dichotomy is not “science v. art” but “material being v. material+ being.” Art, philosophy, religions, what have you feed something that is not just the body.
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Even if he’s a strict materialist, his position is nuts. The same way humans have physical requirements (food, water, air, temperature, etc.) to function properly, we have social and psychological requirements as well. Harder to discern, maybe, and subtler in their failure modes, but still necessary if you want to optimize the “machine” of your body.
So even if he’s starting from “we’re just matter”, he’s missing something huge by not tending to the needs of that matter outside of STEM. Just like we’re stuck eating food and sleeping every day, we’re stuck with art. Claiming we don’t need it is a form of denial.
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Okay, but this kind of argument makes me mad enough to spit. You know why? Because my brother did basically no ‘school’ between the ages of 11-13 – instead, he read through the entire catalogue of Star Wars books available at our local library. Then, he moved from there to the science section, and started reading what amounted to college textbooks on things like engineering and string theory. He taught himself algebra from textbooks, too. Then he worked welding jobs until he saved up enough for college.
Now he’s halfway through a Master’s in mechanical and electrical engineering, with the stated goal of making his own Iron Man suit – complete with Jarvis. He does super-secret military projects for his part time job. He builds cool toys like trebuchets using welding, machining, and 3d printing. And it started with the science fiction section of the local library.
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Cell phones came from Star Trek.
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Robert Heinlein had “cell phones” in his fiction long before Star Trek.
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Yep – in his juveniles there are “belt phones”. And the Dick Tracy comics even further back had pretty much the communications capability of an Apple Watch.
I am a Star Trek fan as far back as actually seeing some of the originals first run as a 7 year old, but the current-day credit to the Star Trek communicator as the sole inspiration for cell phones annoys me as well.
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As you and others note, portable, personal communication devices littered SF (and even Dick Tracy with his two-way wrist radio) for many years. What Star Trek did influence was the design of the flip phone. It was ergonomic engineering that made sense, and it made sense that Hollywood prop designers would come up with that design. The other thing Star Trek did was convince many people that they wanted one, so it drove both the potential market and the innovators to fill that desire.
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As faint memory serves, prior to the early-mid ’60s, Dick Tracy used a two-way wrist radio, but after that it turned into a two-way wrist TV.
The only disappointment I have with my flip phone is that I can’t flick my wrist and have it deploy as in Star Trek. Every time I tried, I was at risk of launching the phone. :)
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Cool! Now do phasers!
(“Set phasers to…caress.” remains one of the best single lines from the original series.)😁
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The reason I say that is the interviews over the years with the people who made cellphones happen. Quite often it came up that they thought Star Trek communicators would be cool, and that’s why they were doing it.
As I remember James H. Schmitz had cellphones too. Telzey Amberdoon had one.
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Heddy Lamar came up with frequency hopping / spread-spectrum commo. (grin)
And a bunch of other useful inventions.
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For about a year, I had a nicely-paying job for a local retired lawyer and gun collector, transcribing the archives of a certain 19th-century industrialist – the archives were in the care of a university, which provided files of PDF scans of the letters and documents. There was business correspondence, and personal letters – not just the industrialist, but his whole family, and his wife’s family. (The collector didn’t want to take the time to transcribe them himself, so he hired me to do it. Sweet gig, by the way. I got rather fond of some of the family, over the distance of 100+ years.) One of the letters was written and mailed from Paris, around 1856, and the writer so missed his family back in the States, and wished that there was such a thing as a pocket telegraph, that he could readily communicate with them, faster than a letter which would (optimistically) take at least two weeks or more to cross the Atlantic – and another two or three weeks to get an answer. In 1856 or so – this man was already visualizing a cellphone…
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THIS.
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“While you two shout at each other about THE ARTS, Chinese 8th graders are learning calculus.”
They’re not though. The Chicoms are lying about that the same as they lie about everything else. Your bro Mr. Schwartz has been drinking the ChinaChinaChina!!! bong water.
Also, was he asleep for all of Covid? STEM was a hearty participant in that, along with -propaganda- which is, I’m sorry, a monster created by…
…wait for it…
The Arts.
Technology does not move the world on its own. You make a better/cheaper/faster mouse trap, you will still require a kick-ass promotional campaign or your invention is going nowhere. Who’s going to write that ad campaign, Schwatzy?
Oh and by the way, who’s going to inspire all those STEM nerds to be awesome and nerd their way to victory instead of being depressed, staying home and smoking weed in Mom’s basement? Hmm?
Ever heard the term “Lying Flat”? It’s what the Chinese kids are doing now, since the government promised them jobs and a life but they LIED. Now the big youth movement in China is not “Let’s go to Mars!” It is “I’m lying flat.”
Calculus is not helpful when you are 25 and Lying Flat is your best option. Tolkien might be. Just a possibility.
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Yeah, China is SHOWING OFF some eighth graders doing calculus. That has nothing at all to do with what their 13 and 14 year olds are actually doing.
Toiling in fields or factories, getting Mao’s “wisdom” and Xi Jinping’s “thought” pounded into their mushy little heads, slowly realizing how bleak their lives are going to be, and being poor and ill-fed is generally what they’re doing.
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There are a few Chinese social media stars showing all the steps in creating something traditionally, like furniture from bamboo, or ink and paper by hand. And Westerners ooh and ahh over how beautiful and amazing these videos are, and I watch and think “oh wow, that’s a LOT of hard labor.”
I mean, kudos to them for monetizing the process in a way that will pay far more than the process itself. But the fact that it’s those videos that are getting traction outside of China isn’t exactly a sterling recommendation for how the culture is functioning. I mean, you’re not seeing super-stardom for how to hunt and clean a buck, or how to forage enough in Appalachia to keep from having to do that huge jaunt to the store more than once every week or two.
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Those videos get traction because the Chinese social media influencers can’t stream much else without getting government scrutiny. As an example, there was a young Chinese man who would stream videos of himself doing nice things for his fellow Chinese citizens. In one of the videos, he bought some meat for an elderly woman, and then bought her a bunch of additional food after he realized just how poor she was. But this got him in trouble with the censors because it unintentionally publicized how little the so-called Iron Rice Bowl government social net for retired seniors actually pays.
Oops…
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They are three to six times our population. Why are they not three to six times our economic size?
Might they be on the wrong foot?
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All you said. Everything. Every bit of it.
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It’s important to teach calculus to 8th graders in China. And then force them to become engineers even if they want to be artists.
We saw the results of this last June. To much fanfare, China built and launched their first nuclear submarine. It was moved a few hundred yards in preperation for completing the finishing touches.
And it sank. In harbor. While tied to a pier.
I happen to be an engineer who loves math. I’m aware that I’m in a tiny minority.
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You’re me in an alternate world. For complex sociological reasons I ended up in hte “humanities” track after 9th grade. It was early enough I suspect I’m a very different person. Little by little I lost the knack of physical tinkering.
…. I still have the engineer’s mind habits, though. See my world building…
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-Anyone- can build s submarine/unterseeboat.
The tricky part of “subnarine” is building one that can repeatedly rise to the surface as needed.
Unassisted.
Otherwise, theory actually role is
reef.
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Comment by a guy who chose aircrewman over bubblehead: “What goes up comes down, but what goes down doesn’t always come back up.”
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Which reminds me again of the story of the country boy recruit to the Navy (WWII era) who was offered a position as aircraft gunner … or as a sub crewman! He turned down both, saying, “I don’t want to be no higher than the corn, or lower than the potatoes.”
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This conversation reminded me a bit of a poem we read in college (considering the date, 1991, it must have come out shortly before we read it). The last two lines stayed with me, though I vaguely remembered the rest.
Advice to My Son
by
Peter Meinke
The trick is, to live your days
as if each one may be your last
(for they go fast, and young men lose their lives
in strange and unimaginable ways)
but at the same time, plan long range
(for they go slow; if you survive
the shattered windshield and the bursting shell
you will arrive
at our approximation here below
of heaven or hell).
To be specific, between the peony and the rose
plant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;
beauty is nectar
and nectar, in a desert, saves,
but the stomach craves stronger sustenance
than the honied vine.
Therefore, marry a pretty girl
after seeing her mother;
Show your soul to one man,
work with another;
and always serve bread with your wine.
But son, always serve wine.
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I don’t read a lot of poetry (though I live in The Divine Comedy, but I like that. So does my beloved.
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Kipling is my choice for poetry, but ditto.😊
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This is where I plug Remodern America by Richard Bledsoe. I can’t say that I liked this book. It’s tedious. But that’s because it’s thorough. But when you are through you will know why there is no art in the west. The left have truly convinced the general public that inane, venal, ugly, trash is true art. And you the GP aren’t hip enough to get it. Sayeth the left.
So when the engineers think they are just doodling between equations and actually turning out neat stuff and so many of us are painting, sculpting, drawing, woodworking, doing music on weekends but we think it’s just goofing off. And still we know trig unless we’re engineers. Then we know calculus.
We’ve bought the lie about art and about science and we need to return it in their faces.
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From Jasini’s post just above:
beauty is nectar
and nectar, in a desert, saves
Those who would deny us beauty are nature’s true horrors — hostis humani generis.
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Absolutely
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This is why the Brutalist-inspired modern architecture is the norm, and I hate this timeline. Why couldn’t we have a revival of Art Deco or Classical architecture? Why can’t we have beautiful AND built to last, rather than the cheap pre-fabbed ugly buildings we see everywhere? It takes engineering and art to make something like the Golden Gate bridge. We need to stop cultivating that feeling that you have to get permission to make something lovely as well as useful.
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Art Nouveau too.
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Even Craftsman is superior to modern faux-Tuscan.
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Be patient. it might yet come.
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Just because I myself have the artistic ability of a quadriplegic chimp, doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate both the beauty of arts and the creativity and talent required to do it well. There is more to life than eighth-grade calculus.
True story…my Depression-era parents, who would berate me if I brought home any grade below an “A” at any point, and threatened to sell my car out from under me in college if I EVER dared to get a single “C”, were perfectly OK with me flunking the last six-week grading period of eighth-grade Art because “it was just Art so it wasn’t important.” (Apparently, clay pots were beyond me even in eighth grade at age 11.) So I do understand why that X guy would say what he said but I rather violently disagree with it. Honestly, in terms of STEM there are parts of it where an “artistic” creative touch is a massive bonus. And I think most inventors have that touch.
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Same here. I can’t draw or paint worth a damn. I wouldn’t know how to even begin at composing music, and my few attempts to learn instruments did not go well. A lot of hard slogging for minimal return. Unsatisfying.
However, I am glad there are people who can draw and paint and sculpt, compose and play music, make stirring, inspiring movies… They make the world a better place. I have pictures on my walls, shelves and shelves of CDs and videos. And books. I have recently discovered that I can write stories, and am doing so. I couldn’t have written these stories 40 years ago, or even 20. I would have enjoyed reading them, though.
On the other hand, I have been fascinated by electronics since the days of vacuum tubes. Even more so when the first microprocessors showed up. “Wow! You just put numbers in memory to make it do all sorts of things!” Thus began my 40+ year career in electronics, engineering, computers and programming. I’ve designed and built some very useful widgets, written some useful programs.
We don’t all have to contribute to the world in the same way, so long as we contribute something of value. Something people want enough to exchange value for in return.
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Why you “have no ability”. You were never given the chance to try and fail and try again. You were never taught that it was fun. You were never taught that art is almost as important as love. I was nearly forty years old when I learned that I could draw by taking a drawing class from a guy who….wait for it…made us practice drawing and I mean basics, straight lines and circles for warm ups, positive shapes, masses…
Where did I put that link to the talent/work/results article dangit? But I note so many of techs and engineers and network types have a side hobby of some sort that is artistic.
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I’m flashing back 40 years or so when I was developing integrated circuits. The designer would handle the electronics, but the mask designer would take those elements and turn them into artwork. Some of it was rather beautiful. (We were doing interface chips, usually. Part digital, but a lot of analog circuitry. 15 years later, it was mostly digital, and automated. And boring to look at.)
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“Apparently, clay pots were beyond me even in eighth grade at age 11.”
Apparently, your art teacher wasn’t playing fair. I am a fair hand at most artistic pursuits, and I failed so hard at second-level ceramics (throwing pots on a wheel) my senior year. I had all of two small and misshapen pots by the end of the term.
My teacher gave me an A. She said she had seen me, every day, go to the wheel and screw up. She wasn’t going to fail that level of effort put out by a 12th-grader, despite the fact that I never could make a decent pot. (Figured out in college that it was my lack of upper body strength and not being able to center the clay properly. I was then able to manage a way around that.)
To expect a 5th-grader to succeed at the beginning with pinch pots or coils or whatever you were doing is why so many people turn away from arts. That’s just awful.
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Specialization is for insects.
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“Not to evoke the unholy name of Fauci” Yes, do invoke the unholy name of Fauci at every opportunity. He should be famous as the personification of pseudo-scientific hubris for generations.
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My mom got called in by the Art teacher when I was in middle school, as I wasn’t drawing people properly just doing stick figures. And I was getting “cranky” (yelling back at the teacher “I CAN”T DRAW” was considered cranky I guess). The teacher had the belief I was being bad on purpose. Mom said she couldn’t draw people either, and what’s the problem?
I have drawn a straight line once, when I was trying for a curve. *sigh. Cutting a straight line is darn right frustrating at times, even with all the available tools, and I do woodworking as one of the many hobbies.
Turns out that dyslexia/Left/Right issues makes it hard to draw not just read.
So making “art” is not what I do. I make things that work, and I try to have them be good to look at/feel/use. A well built tool is art, just not for everyone. And if all you’re trying to do is shock people with what you did is…juvenile, boring, and just plain yuck.
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I have all those issues, and I can draw. I just didn’t pursue it. But then I AM weird. :D
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Chalk pastels or charcoal, not lines, shapes and masses. Well do some lines and circles for warm ups but do them with chalk pastels. I think only illustrators like Cedar can draw with lines. I can’t illustrate. But I can draw.
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Trying to say something profound when your muse is stuck in neutral is a down right bitch, but then again so is my muse. I think her and my guardian angel both got drunk last night, I am not going their at all, I hope their alcohol fueled liaison was worth it. shrug… kicks dust bunny.
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There’s a relevant scene from Dead Poet’s Society but I can’t find it right at the moment.
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Found it.
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This reminds me of a favorite section from Tom Wolfe’s book, _I am Charlotte Simmons_. The main character states:
“Anyway, the Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let the slaves get educated in all sorts of practical subjects, like math, like engineering so they could build things, like music so they could be entertainers? But only Roman citizens, the free people?–liber?–could take things like rhetoric and literature and history and theology and philosophy? Because they were the arts of persuasion–and they didn’t want the slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise up or something? So the ‘liberal’ arts are the arts of persuasion, and they didn’t want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people.”
I’ve seen the false panic from pundits about an education arms race with Asia. It’s…false in so many ways. It isn’t a dichotomy between arts and math.
Steve Jobs: “Steve Jobs was a student at Reed College in the fall of 1972 and majored in English. After just one semester, he dropped out but continued living on campus with friends and auditing classes, including Shakespeare, modern dance, and calligraphy.”
J.K. Rowling majored in Classics. Alexander Karp was a philosophy major. Let us not despair.
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One thing to add, as to why the twit is dumb, that I noticed during my teaching career: intelligence and knowledge in a single person are not zero-sum. What I mean is, it is very much the case that someone who studies calculus in eight grade will also be good at the arts, and if they study both, they will be better at both. Learning begets a love of learning, which transfers between subjects quite well.
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Yep.
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One thing to add, as to why the twit is dumb, that I noticed during my teaching career: intelligence and knowledge in a single person are not zero-sum. What I mean is, it is very much the case that someone who studies calculus in eight grade will also be good at the arts, and if they study both, they will be better at both. Learning begets a love of learning, which transfers between subjects quite well.
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The left is the reason why even high school students mostly don’t get to learn calculus; they have spent decades dumbing down the curricula in the name of “equity” and “fairness”. They were able to do so because of their control over the institutions, particularly the artistic ones, which were used to spread their propaganda for decades. If you want to get rid of that institutional control, you need to communicate outside of those institutions channels, and yes art is a way to do it.
With regard to what students in the CCP do, is emulating the CCP, which is a totalitarian state, really what people want for the USA. We know those who seek to make the USA another socialist totalitarian state love the CCP and boast about their desired that we emulate it, but everyone else should be screaming “hell no”. To me, asserting we need to be more like CCP controlled China means that one has lost the argument.
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It’s wrong to teach calculus because one kid might not understand it, and ‘feel bad’. Waaaaah.
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My eldest taught himself precalculus over a summer so that he could progress to calculus early. Out of a standard textbook, no less. The email from the challenge test (automatically generated) was kind of funny: “He has received a score of 100%, which is a passing grade.”
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Card: Good seeing your pixels. I’ve been worried about not seeing you.
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I can actually understand why a lot of successful entertainers are entranced by socialism. Anybody who makes it in that field has almost certainly had a lot of lucky breaks. Case in point—Harrison Ford. He’d had roles in movies, but he was by no means a Name. Until he got called in for a carpentry job (Ford’s a very skilled carpenter) at George Lucas’ house. Lucas liked what he saw, offered him a chance at playing Han Solo, and the rest is history. Had Lucas had a different carpenter, Ford would be a no-name bit actor, at best.
They also all know or know of people who were just as skilled and talented who didn’t get the breaks; they didn’t catch the right person’s eye, the project(s) they were involved in fell through or flopped, they rubbed a Very Important Person the wrong way in some way or another, and they never broke out of the bottom of the business. All the talent in the world won’t help you in that situation.
As for weed—I agree completely that smoking it is bad. It’s wasteful. Far better to bake it into pastries (Alice B. Toklas brownies, anyone?) or brew it into beer or wine. I will stipulate that some people should not partake, but I can say the same of a lot of other mind-altering substances, alcohol very emphatically included.
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Meh. Weed has a lot of effects you wouldn’t want long term. But I firmly believe in people’s right to go to hell in the manner of their choosing.
I’m just appalled at the same people who say tobacco gives you cancer supporting weed. The cancer is a side effect of the SMOKE not the thing smoked.
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OT but grimly interesting (if true): a number of conservative “influencers” were swatted today and the comment was the swatters were sending pizza deliveries to the target homes in advance. So, Sarah, if you find an unordered pizza being delivered, watch out.
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Yeah. I don’t think I’m big enough to be a target, but yeah. Last doxing attempt was the last house we lived in before this one, so we might be okay.
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Further info this morning from RedState….the $#@@ $doing this have been sending Domino’s or Papa Johns pizza, COD (Cash On Delivery). Perfectly encapsulates the petty spite of the swatters.
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Look out for secondary effects: “Another swatting? No need to respond.”
Which is why when they catch someone doing this, they need to put them under the jail.
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sorry, the left REALLY don’t want to risk themselves. And they know a lot of us are armed. Note how the fun and games quieted down post Rittenhouse.
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Hopefully the bad guys have no idea where you are.
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Mrph. As though “The Arts” – religiously associated or not – haven’t been pursued by humans except in the most dire of starvation/plague situations. I’m not sure that they weren’t even then; things just aren’t expressed in permanent forms as much when in such circumstances.
One can argue that the comfort coming with technology does allow for more production of “arts” – but I’m not all that sure of that, either, looking at the fetid swamp of overflowed sewage that you have to struggle through to find anything actually artistic these days. Is more actually worthwhile art being created today than in 1825? In 1025?
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Sarah, apparently there’s more of us Neanderthals than show up on DNA tests…
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The world owes more to Norman Borlaug than it can ever repay.
No scientist of any depth or experience would argue that art or religion have no place in the human experience. They are separate spheres having equal value and offering different insights. Some of us would argue that each is essential to a full life.
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I was a computer programmer by training, and a full-time professional mother by choice, and I know this much:
IF OF THY MORTAL GOODS thou art bereft,And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,Sell one, and with the doleBuy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
— attributed to Sadi
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Lost the paragraphing — WPDE
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The tweet that kicked this all off…
I’m guessing that guy hasn’t heard about the “laying flat” rebellion going on in China now.
Just saying that it seems we’re all about to learn the lesson that just teaching the kids “how” isn’t enough. The kids need a sufficient “why” as well.
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