russell

Ah, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stepehson updated for the internet age. Worth reading if you havent.

I say the girl should be congratulated for her ingenuity. The amount of effort she put into tweaking the teacher's tail is commendable. The real "solution" here is for her to find a mentor who will channel her efforts into more projects that make people think as well as shock them. Sometimes this is risky for the teacher, but god knows we need more critical thinkers.

When I was 14, more than half a century ago, I got into trouble for holding opinions that the people her would consider merely progressive. One of my daughters in high school got into insulting her peer group by using a vocabulary they didnt understand. They thought she was praising them. She is now in her thirties and very well adjusted. If she had done such a thing in middle school, I would have been very amused, but her mother would have been absolutely mortified. Probably best that she didnt.

It's a history of presidential nomination conventions ffrom their appearance in the early 1800s. The takeaway is they can never get it right.

I'm not sure where you got your numbers. The 10 largest cities in the US have a population of 26M (2015 estimates, Wikipedia). Generally population estimates are given for the metropolitan area. The 10 largest have a population of 73 million. There are 53 MSAs with a population over 1M with perhaps a total population of 150M. (I was too lazy to do all the addition.) The US has a large area, but it is primarily urban.

According to the review, DeLong and Cohen have written a historical analysis of what has worked as economic engines in America's economic history. Their observation is that it is big concrete advancements like Hamilton's banking system, the railroads, and Roosevelt's trust busting. They say things went awry in the 70s and 80s when the economy turned from manufacturing to healthcare and rentier industries like finance, and the adoption of the Free Market ideology. The way back on course is for the government to back big ideas once more.

I'm not sure. The Japanese tried very hard (remember 5th generation computing?) and failed. However, the idea of the historical analysis is intriguing enough that I have ordered a copy. If I can read fast enough, I will try to report back before the topic has migrated into oblivion.

We certainly need some concrete and philosophical changes. The rentier class cannot continue to siphon of all productivity increases to stash into their private asset accounts, without bringing the world to its knees.

All well and good if your kids are from a school known to the admissions department at the colleges they are applying to, otherwise the AP courses, with all their flaws, are a reasonable compromise that gets them college credit.

My kids took a different route when faced with a truly incompetent high school calculus teacher. My wife convinced the high school to allow them to take courses at the local community college for both high school and college credit. The courses were approved by the University of California so there was no issue about transfer of credits.

From your second link: >>>The junction provides access to and from the A38 (Tyburn Road), A38(M) (Aston Expressway), the A5127 (Lichfield Road/Gravelly Hill), and several unclassified local roads. It covers 30 acres (12 ha), serves 18 routes and includes 4 km (2.5 mi) of slip roads, but only 1 km (0.6 mi) of the M6 itself. Across 5 different levels, it has 559 concrete columns, reaching up to 24.4 m (80 ft). The engineers had to elevate 21.7 km (13.5 mi) of motorway to accommodate two railway lines, three canals, and two rivers.

Truly an inspiration to those of us who grew up with Erector Sets and Tinker Toys.

California is quite peculiar. California has 482 municipalities. Whether they call themselves cities or towns is local preference, although fewer than two dozen call themselves towns. The largest municipality is Los Angeles with 3.7 million people. The smallest is Vernon with 112 people. I live in the unincorporated town of Cambria with a population of about 6000. We are about 20 miles from the nearest city, but we have no local government at all. The closest we have to a government is the community services district which runs the water district, the sewerage treatment plant and the fire department.

Cambria is in San Luisbo County which has an area of 3600 square miles and a population of over a quarter million but only 5 cities. California has a law that makes in almost impossible for a new city to incorporate. The new city must reimburse the county for any lost tax revenues caused by incorporation. If your GPS reports a city some distance away, it probably reporting the county seat of an unincorporated area.

Hah! The army is the only service not getting one, unless there is a helicopter variant in there somewhere.

Indeed. There was a paper done in the 70s or 80s that found that operating system size doubled with each new feature. Picture going from single tasking to multitasking or to virtual memory. Sorry, I cant dredge up the reference.

The lack of interlocks really surprised me, although the name said so. The CDC 6600 had them two decades earlier. We always carefully scheduled our instructions flows, but it was nice to know that the hardware would catch our goofs.