Posted on 08/22/2004 12:02:47 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Yup. What you hire in at is your salary forever. Piss poor way to run a space program.
Ha! My most recent math professor drilled us in mechanics. He said if he called on the phone at 3AM waking us up we should be able to do an integration by parts, give him the result, and roll over and go back to sleep.
135 - "crane operators don't get to slip by. If you're lucky somebody won't get killed the first hour."
That depends on who is doing the hiring, whether they slip by or not, but the poor ones are soon found out, even certified operators, as crane operating is more of an 'art' and requires generally a very sharp, and agile able to mentally calculate, angles, variables, angles, winds, support, all at the same time.
That is why I mentioned sailboat sailor. I found that the best natural crane operators, even without training, were good sailboat sailors.
But extrememly dangerous, extremely fast. One minor error and catastrophe and death. Crane operators don't 'fall asleep' while 'driving (from boredom), like truck drivers.
Here is a true, amusing, strange story. Once, on a job in Saudi, I noticed, after work, one of my British crane operators out in the yard, driving around a small, rough terrain, mobile crane - A 25k Gallion. He was having a ball, just backing up, turning, doing all kinds of strange movements. As it was really boring, and many did strange things for entertainment, and he wasn't bothering anybody, I didn't interrupt. But when he came back in, and I got an opportunity, I asked him what he was doing, and he said 'practicing' - and I said - "You are a good crane operator, why do you need to 'practice', and he responded - "Oh, yeah, the 'crane' part, no problem. It's the driving. I can't drive, have no lisence, so I am practicing driving, so I can get a lisence when I go back to the UK."
True story.
136 - "Students are very capable of learning calculational or algebraic dance steps (such as finding a derivative) without having any clear idea of what it means,"
I agree, but would leave out the 'very'. Rote learning does work, but, since you apparently are a teaccher, and still teaching, and especially since we have computers now which can instantly recalc and redraw, why not try taking a problem and demonstrate graphically, what even very minor changes in different values do to the graphical depiction. I think you would be surprised at how much easier some will catch on to the ideas of what the formulas actually govern, and it may mean far more can understand far more quickly and easily.
In fact, you may find that it will save many of your otherwise 'smart' students who otherwise just don't 'get' calculus, so they give up.
When I was seven, I decided I wanted to be both a scientist AND a truck driver when I grew up. More than twenty years later, I'm getting my Ph.d in the humanities, and I still don't have a driver's license. Que sera, sera...
We actually still teach a fairly 'traditional' calculus at our shop: mostly algebraic. Too much graphics/intuition at the expense of algebra skills leaves students underprepared for differential equations and the like.
We use TI-86 graphing calculators, and the software Derive, to help students visualize formulas. There's a nifty little piece of software called Cyclone that draws three-dimensional implicit surfaces; the student can change coefficients of the equation by changing a slider, and the surface changes real-time as the student moves his or her mouse. We use this in calc III.
Right. Of course I was speaking of senior and graduate level, real variables, complex variables. Freshmen can be memorizing some trig while they are there, sin pi/2, double angle formulas, it makes things a lot easier and quicker later.
THANK YOU MY GOOD AND TRUSTED FRIEND. AS SOON AS THESE ADMINISTRATIVE DIFFICULTIES ARE CLEARED UP, WITH THE HELP OF YOUR EXPENSE MONEY, I WILL BE ABLE TO SEND TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT THE $60 MILLION MY UNCLE, THE GENERAL, HAS BEEN TRYING TO EXPATRIATE.
/s/ ABU BANTU
LOL! Haven't seen one of those in a while.
You have to build the infrastructure first. Spending money on "anti gravity" and the like is not the path to take IMHO. If we used lunar mass drivers as an example, getting material into orbit becomes far easier than from the gravity well we inhabit.
Smiles
When I was about seven, I wanted to be an astronaut. Guess I didn't do too badly. Never flew, but got to work with the space program. :-)
What do you think contributes more to our standard of living? A foundation excavation, or some HTML floating around in cyberspace?
TI-86 - Pretty nifty. My experience is old, I used to love my various TI calculators until I got Excel, and figured out how to use it. Not familiar with the current TI's, though it sounds pretty good, I seriously doubt a hand calculator can give quite the visualization and flexibility of a PC, spreadsheet, graphics and monitor. But, our schools must be practical too.
try a PC and the spreadsheet MS Excel for entering data and formulas, and use the graphics package in Excel for displaying the results.
You can do all kinds of neat things, easily and quickly, once you get the hang of it. And laying out and printing out the data in spreadsheet format and charts using Excel (while it takes a while to learn) can do/show most amazing things, in big screen and in multi-colors and 3-d.
Excel is highly programmable and full of hundreds and hundreds of built in functions - though they are not readily apparent. Get a good book on Excel and Customizing Excel will yield amazing results.
In fact, there used to be various TI emulators available, as add-ins.
To give you a simple idea in Excel - just enter in row(s)/column(s) of numbers and highlight them, and click on the little bar graph icon and create charts and graphs automatically. Enter formulas if you wish to automatically calculate the rows and columns of data.
As a mathematician, you should have a ball with Excel, after using the TI.
Just a question: traditionally, how much of the space budget has been allocated from defense funding? The main incentive for our space program was competition with the Soviets; in fact, the post war move towards greater science funding was largely to maintain both industrial superiority and to improve our defensive capability (even CERN, as part of the Marshall Plan, was an outgrowth of American defense funding). In this regard, we were too successful; the Soviet Union is gone, our enemies do not belong to a nation-state and our relationship with China although not warm, has been cordial enough for the last thirty years that their rapidly-acclerating space program is not perceived as a threat to us (from beyond the grave, Nixon continues to screw the space program). How else can we justify further space exploration, and science in general, except by repeating R.R. Wilson's famous (and very true) statement that it gives us something worth defending?
151 - " If we used lunar mass drivers as an example, getting material into orbit becomes far easier than from the gravity well we inhabit."
Shooting ingots into space using mass drivers from the moon is rather interesting.
However, ingots won't do it. Try mass driving JPL, or Boeing, or Northrop into space - it doesn't work.
152 - "When I was about seven, I wanted to be an astronaut. Guess I didn't do too badly. Never flew, but got to work with the space program. :-)"
Just like my brother, the 'color blind' NASA engineer. (Knocked out of the astronaut program before he could start, because he was slightly color blind), so he ended up with a career as a NASA engineer.
So, you think we should send our people to china to build foundations, so we can make more money?
I have some ruby rods (see the post on transparent aluminum) left over from laser experiments. I have contacts in Tel Aviv and Amsterdam who will cut the rods into jewelry quality stones and set them. I do need some seed money however to pay the cutters and setters and to buy the gold for the settings. If you could send me $5,000,000 (certified check or Western Union), I could let you have 5% of the action.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.