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TheCatt 
Top 2%
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 22951
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,13:59 |
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BAD!
QUOTE My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?
I was mentioning that to one of my co-workers the other day. He asked for some esoteric SQL DBA command syntax, and I said "I don't memorize that stuff, if it's not in my recent brain cache, I google."
By Googling, I can know more languages, more facts, more anything that I could otherwise. I don't need to know the specific implementations that particular languages or databases use, I just need to know the universal concepts, and then google how to apply them.
Technology is good.
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It's not me, it's someone else.
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GORDON
90%
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 36125
Joined: Jun. 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,14:00 |
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Until the power goes out.
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I don't give a fuck!
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| Post Number: 3
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TheCatt
Top 2%
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 22951
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,14:04 |
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If the power goes out, I don't do any work anyway.
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It's not me, it's someone else.
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TPRJones
I saw The Fault in our Stars opening night.
Group: Privateers
Posts: 12384
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,14:13 |
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The key is the ability to still integrate concepts. Â Having to look up an SQL command doesn't mean you can't understand what is going on and put together new ideas and innovative solutions. Â But if you had to look up basic concepts all the time then you wouldn't be able to integrate those ideas into your approach because they wouldn't be something you are aware of during that part of the process.
That's why it's still important to learn stuff, so that somewhere in your brain it lurks and can be usefully integrated. Â Even if you still have to go look up the details first.
Technology is good. Â But it's not a substitute for being conscious (or at least subconscious) of the concepts.
Edited by TPRJones on May 18 2011,14:14
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Vidi Perfutui Veni
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TheCatt
Top 2%
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 22951
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,16:41 |
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(TPRJones @ May 18 2011,17:15)
QUOTE QUOTE Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Um ... yeah? Â And store-bought butter destroyed the churning skills of millions. Â So what? This guy is just a Luddite.
Yes, who gives a fuck about penmanship?
Every time I read that I juts think "this person is an idiot"
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GORDON
90%
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 36125
Joined: Jun. 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,16:42 |
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Every time I see an adult making letters like a grade schooler, I think the same thing.
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GORDON
90%
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 36125
Joined: Jun. 2004
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Posted on: May 18 2011,17:00 |
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Must be why all of the pencil and pen makers have gone out of business.
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I don't give a fuck!
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Malcolm
I disagree.
Group: Privateers
Posts: 27168
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 19 2011,12:10 |
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I'm still pissed about the invention of paper. Â I was just getting my rock chiseling skills to the point where I could do neolithic calligraphy.
QUOTE And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?
Because my brain isn't a hard disk with random access capability. Â If you want to live your life without books or external storage of information, go right ahead. Â Give the Neanderthals my regards when you see them.
The only time my handwriting really matters anymore is when I go to trivia night. On my team, I always write the answers because my penmanship (due to nuns beating my knuckles with rulers back in the day, I guess) is still above decent, even when I write in cursive.
Edited by Malcolm on May 19 2011,12:13
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Diogenes of Sinope:
"It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
"Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC:
"Better dead than smeg."
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TheCatt
Top 2%
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Posts: 22951
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 19 2011,12:39 |
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I hope they dont teach cursive any more, cuz hell if I can help my kid with that bullshit.
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Leisher
Top 3%, yo.
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 26651
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: May 19 2011,18:39 |
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My hand starts to get sore if I write more than what fits on a post-it note anymore.
As for the article, technology is awesome. I get where it can be bad as it's taken some of the joys of life away, like privacy, but everything good/bad that gets affected is just replaced by something new. That's evolution.
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thibodeaux
RAG
Group: Privateers
Posts: 6494
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: Nov. 09 2012,05:35 |
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QUOTE Kail believes in a progressive approach to education
Sweet bleeding Jeebus.
QUOTE rapid mental retrieval of basic facts is a prerequisite for doing more complex, and more interesting, kinds of math
Exactly!
QUOTE Serge Lang, a math professor at Yale, used to give his Calculus students a fairly simple algebra problem on the first day of classes, one which almost everyone could solve, but some of them solved it as quickly as they could write while others took a while, and Professor Lang claimed that all of the students who solved the problem as quickly as they could write would get an A in the Calculus course, and all the others wouldn’t. The speed with which they solved a simple algebra problem was as good a predictor of the final grade in Calculus as a whole semester of homework, tests, midterms, and a final.
You see, if you can’t whiz through the easy stuff at 100 m.p.h., you’re never gonna get the advanced stuff.
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Leisher
Top 3%, yo.
Group: Super Administrators
Posts: 26651
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: Nov. 09 2012,06:39 |
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The only place where I think technology is having any sort of negative effect is in social skills.
People can't spell, they gots no good grammer (Yes Thib, that's intentional), SOMETIMES THEY DO THIS, folks text instead of talk, walls of text are considered by some to be in bad form, it's giving folks ADD, etc.
On the bright side...porn.
Edited by Leisher on Nov. 09 2012,06:39
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Malcolm
I disagree.
Group: Privateers
Posts: 27168
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: Nov. 09 2012,07:48 |
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Also from Joel.
QUOTE Without understanding functional programming, you can't invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable. The terms Map and Reduce come from Lisp and functional programming. MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their 6.001-equivalent programming class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable. The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn't, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world's largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don't think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave.
I sincerely hope some exec from MS read that. I fucking hope he printed it out and wallpapered Steve Ballmer's office, house, and car with it.
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Diogenes of Sinope:
"It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
"Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC:
"Better dead than smeg."
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TPRJones
I saw The Fault in our Stars opening night.
Group: Privateers
Posts: 12384
Joined: May 2004
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Posted on: Nov. 09 2012,08:26 |
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These are the last gasps of a dying industry. Education is about to get completely renovated over the next decade or two. All the shitty teachers hiding in the bureaucracy will fight it tooth and nail, but their days are numbered.
I recommend this YoutTube playlist for those who are interested in details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v....Wpmw2zo
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Vidi Perfutui Veni
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