America is a toilet

[Ammonsa 308]

One thing Australia is undergoing now is a review of the education system, because our federal government has far greater control over the content of the education systems in the states. A benefit of this is our ability to have a standardised national curriculum, but a downside is that now when we've recently had an election to a super right-wing party, they have the ability to puppy around with whats being taught. Currently they're saying stuff about how history being taught in Australia currently is somehow too left-wing, even though it suffers a number of issues involving kind of half-assedly acknowledging indigenous australians and then skirting over the fact that we committed a genocide. They want to remove the slight education we get involving what imperialism and colonists here did.

[Chase 390]

Why do people find it so hard to plainly state what has happened in the past? I don't understand what is so difficult about reporting the facts.

[Ammonsa 308]

Because the people most suited to reporting the facts are going to be people with first hand experience in whatever history they're recording. This alone is going to make them biased. Even if it's unintentional, it'll be all too easy for people to record history in a manner not totally objective. It's only really through piecing together multiple recordings of the same time period can people now actually gather an accurate view on what actually happened, and it's still not going to be great.

[Chase 390]

People wish to hide the evil they have done.

 

The victor may write history, but the truth will be made known eventually.

[Chimetals 344]

Not if they destroy the defeated group's culture, people, language, and libraries. And even if the truth becomes known--how many know that truth? That's more or less the case/problem with American history, the point of this thread--we're all older and finding out some of these events from the other group's perspective, but we're basically just stumbling across them. And how many people aren't stumbling across them? How many people know that Columbus thought he was in fricken India every time he came to America--multiple trips, and that he had found a new continent never occurred to him.

 

 

My big gripes with the US education system:

- Not teaching metric from an early age

- Teaching pi instead of tau

- Spelling is arbitrary and stupid in the English language, and so are many of its mechanics

-metric--I agree on this one, America is being dumb about this and we need to kill the English system. I switched my phone temperature for this, just so I can better think in Celcius--and you know what? It worked. You learn pretty darn quick what -2C means compared to -18C and how many layers you need to wear to avoid frostbite.

 

-killing pi would be nastier than killing the English system. I have honestly never heard of Tau before this, except when used as a variable, specifically for time in convolution. I've dealt with it in other forms, but never this pi-alternative. I will also admit that I don't have much preference for any infinite number that makes my nice fractions into disgusting decimals--logical enough argument, witty video, but it's harder to argue "this is so much simpler" when you're talking about thousands of dollars per school per textbook, to remove a factor of 2. Metric, at least, is "its all tens, everything is tens, math is nicer".

 

--All languages have their jacked up inconsistencies. Japanese is logical as all get-out, but you've still got weird suffix changes on, what, one, three, six, eight, and ten for h-sounding counter words? first second third fourth much? And then the convolution that is the writing system--borrowing Chinese characters, mutating them for kana, and preserving them at the same time for use as Chinese characters. Then borrowed words from other languages, politeness levels--and, yeah, not much of an advantage. Latin-based languages, from my understanding, are similar to English in that regard, though English admittedly has the problem of picking up a lot more words from a lot more countries than it probably should have. But killing English would be harder than even killing pi, unless some other nation/culture takes over English-speaking countries and forcefully destroys our culture and language.

 

I know there have been movements to change to a phonetic alphabet, but they weren't wide-spread enough, and again we are talking about tons of money for textbook and book changes, older generations wouldn't be able to operate on it, signs and labels would be incredibly confused--no matter how good the idea, the implementation is too nasty for it to take off without a huge backing.

[Ammonsa 308]

Not if they destroy the defeated group's culture, people, language, and libraries. And even if the truth becomes known--how many know that truth? That's more or less the case/problem with American history, the point of this thread--we're all older and finding out some of these events from the other group's perspective, but we're basically just stumbling across them. And how many people aren't stumbling across them? How many people know that Columbus thought he was in fricken India every time he came to America--multiple trips, and that he had found a new continent never occurred to him.

 

 

-metric--I agree on this one, America is being dumb about this and we need to kill the English system. I switched my phone temperature for this, just so I can better think in Celcius--and you know what? It worked. You learn pretty darn quick what -2C means compared to -18C and how many layers you need to wear to avoid frostbite.

 

-killing pi would be nastier than killing the English system. I have honestly never heard of Tau before this, except when used as a variable, specifically for time in convolution. I've dealt with it in other forms, but never this pi-alternative. I will also admit that I don't have much preference for any infinite number that makes my nice fractions into disgusting decimals--logical enough argument, witty video, but it's harder to argue "this is so much simpler" when you're talking about thousands of dollars per school per textbook, to remove a factor of 2. Metric, at least, is "its all tens, everything is tens, math is nicer".

 

--All languages have their jacked up inconsistencies. Japanese is logical as all get-out, but you've still got weird suffix changes on, what, one, three, six, eight, and ten for h-sounding counter words? first second third fourth much? And then the convolution that is the writing system--borrowing Chinese characters, mutating them for kana, and preserving them at the same time for use as Chinese characters. Then borrowed words from other languages, politeness levels--and, yeah, not much of an advantage. Latin-based languages, from my understanding, are similar to English in that regard, though English admittedly has the problem of picking up a lot more words from a lot more countries than it probably should have. But killing English would be harder than even killing pi, unless some other nation/culture takes over English-speaking countries and forcefully destroys our culture and language.

 

I know there have been movements to change to a phonetic alphabet, but they weren't wide-spread enough, and again we are talking about tons of money for textbook and book changes, older generations wouldn't be able to operate on it, signs and labels would be incredibly confused--no matter how good the idea, the implementation is too nasty for it to take off without a huge backing.

 

Funnily enough, I can't distinguish between -2C and -18C simply because I don't think I've ever been in cold below like -4 or -5 :PPPPPPP

[Chimetals 344]

-18C is "this is bullshit why did I go to this school they never told me the weather was this nutty".

 

Also when they send out useless warnings about frostbite that boil down to "if your fingers look like this, get out of the cold and don't stick anything in hot water"

[Ammonsa 308]

Ahaha i just checked and the average low for the coldest time of the year where i live is -0.1C, and the absolute coldest it's ever been at the coldest time of the year here is -10C and that was like 50 years ago

[Knuckle 484]

History is one of the toughest subjects to teach responsibly, if it's even possible at all. This is because when we learn history, we are actually being taught a very specific interpretation of it; no way of seeing things is "right" but rather just one bias among a million others. It's not until you reach college that your brain is finally ready to grasp the idea that what you were taught is a specific interpretation of events. All of the most important facts regarding how we learn and study history are taught in every college historiography class around the world, but only history majors will take that class.

 

I personally think historiography (very basically it can be defined as the study of how we examine history) is the most important class I ever took for my major, because it taught me to understand why we prioritize the facts that we do as history students. But if you tried to teach the class to even high school students they would not be able to understand it probably 90% of the time; you really have to learn a lot of history before you're ready for historiography. Because of that we can't teach it to kids, and I personally imagine they'd only maybe get that all history is interpretation.

 

So what's the alternative? There's always the long-upheld method of teaching bare facts, but that kills enthusiasm like nothing else. Almost nobody wants to study just facts with no understanding of why those facts are so important as building blocks. That's probably why a lot of high school level history has some interpretation mixed into it. Personally, I know I'll end up having to teach students a very specific interpretation of history, but I'd like to include a very basic section of historiography if I could. 

 

A lot of college level history professors will carefully stress that their class is merely an interpretation meant to increase your interest in the field. A really good history professor will have you learn the bare facts of a topic, then use heavy doses of interpretation in their lectures, culminating with a paper or research of some sort that encourages you to modify or outright challenge that professor's way of thinking. What's great about this method is it really drives a point home: there is no one way to properly interpret an event. Whiggish interpretations won't do hardly ever. Marxist analyses are flawed, and so is the French Annales school for that matter (these are all just established ways of interpreting any given event, don't worry about the finer points).

 

Yes we can say that our interpretations of American history have their flaws, but it is no better if you try and argue that another interpretation you learned is automatically better. For example, I've learned about the history of American immigration from two sides; that of America, and the views of Scotland (where a lot of immigrants came from as I imagine a lot of you know). My American high school and early college education would emphasize that our nation had no choice but to severely limit all immigration in the 1923 and 24 legislation on quotas so that job scarcity and overpopulation of cities could be avoided. Meanwhile, the Scottish classes I took emphasized that American racism grew rapidly in the early twentieth century, and the legislation barring many immigrants was a sign of this.

 

The important thing to take out of this difference in viewpoints is that both sides have their merits. The American interpretation is the one most intimate with the rationale Congressmen and the presidents (Harding and then Coolidge at the time, if you're interested) and does a good job explaining how the government did the best it could to control a huge number of immigrants. Scottish interpretation is obviously more understanding of the economic forces that drove Scottish immigrants to America and really gets how a big restriction on immigrants in the US destroyed a lot of people's hopes and in some cases condemned them to death as they couldn't support their families.

 

Each interpretation of the event that is early twentieth century immigration reform has it's merits, and neither is truly right. Personally I take about half of each as the best way to see things, but what's important is that the responsible way of learning history requires that everyone does that. The worst thing you can do to yourself is adhere to one person's interpretation of history as fact, because you're cheating yourself out of the other million pieces of the story.

 

Short version: There's no easy way to properly teach history. Also there is no "right" analysis of history.

[Teto 2609]

Your talking about teaching history reminds me of The Left Hand of Darkness, which has an opening paragraph that has a little bit on the nature of fact and truth and such. "I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling", meaning that even if something is true, but it is not presented well, it might not be believed. Likewise I suppose, a bunch of crap presented in a fleshed out and explained way will still be believed.

 

Only have to look around tumblr (or plenty other places) for a short while to find examples of well-presented bullshit, and you can see how many people believe those things simply based on how taken-in they were by the way it was written.

[LLmao ?✊? 1276]

I feel like people on Tumblr naturally align themselves with the "underdog" group. So that they can feel like they are a good person, feel like they're relevant in some way and also so that they will constantly have something to fill their time (since it's an uphill battle and will never gain much actual traction). I honestly believe those things.

They are such chumps for rhetoric that fact-checking isn't even considered.

[Sahaqiel 1232]

@Chimetals

 

Tau vs. Pi

Your arguments about implementation are pretty much invalid if you agree we should switch to metric. We'd have to change a ton of textbooks,

and street signs, and all our engineering documents, because engineers in the US use imperial for some godawful reason. Foot-pounds?

 

If you've never heard of tau and don't bother to understand why it's much simpler, then you should learn about it before you say it sounds weird and unusable; I understand it's used as a time variable, as well as the variable for torque. There is, however, literally no implementation of pi that is more convenient and easier to understand than using two pi, which proponents of the movement have arbitrarily called tau, just like William Jones arbitrarily called our currently standard circle constant pi. And it's not like symbols exclusively mean one thing in physics-- you probably know as well as I do how much V gets around, or phi, and how many subscripts are thrown this way and that. Tau is also used in the golden ratio. The point is, our use of pi is entirely rooted in tradition, and makes trigonometry a matter of arbitrary memorization rather than understanding, which is the exact opposite of what education should be about.

 

I really don't think there's an argument to be made against tau other than that it might be a little inconvenient to switch to it for awhile, but I disagree with that too, because most people who switch to tau do it pretty much seamlessly; it just makes that much sense, and it's not an isolated movement; Nabeshin used it before I ever brought it up to him. And after years of not understanding pi, I understood tau near-instantly. Here's another video about it by the guy who started the movement. Spend some time integrating in polar coordinates and tell me tau isn't dead-simpler. In fact, the only argument I've heard from people in mathematics against tau is that making trigonometry easier to understand might put more competition in engineering fields, and they don't want competition. :S 2pi shows up more in mathematics than pi ever does alone, and if you watch the video, he even explains why our area equation obscures relationships to other recognizable mathematical functions.

 

Another thing about the textbooks-- new editions of textbooks come out frequently so as to make money anyway, and the actual reason they should be doing it is to append necessary knowledge or changes in how you learn the subject matter. Textbook manufacturers would jump on the chance to do this, and I'm sure you'll agree it wouldn't be hard if you think about it that way. Tau is not an issue of convenience, or of ease of use. It fully embodies both those things. Tau is an issue of breaking some frankly stupid tradition we have that alienates people from learning about something that should be rock simple. If we're truly debating about educating future generations better, you shouldn't have a single problem with a movement to switch to tau, point-blank.

 

English

You disregard that for some reason, when listing a sequence of numbers, we have words like "first, second, third". Where in the word "first" is there the word "one"? Two in "second"? Five in "fifth"? And so on. We have such stupid language inconsistencies, like how read and lead rhyme, and so do read and lead. We have silent letters everywhere. We just have a lot of bad, dumb ideas in the English language. And I don't think it would be hard to switch to a phonetic alphabet-- just until recently we had a weird character that looked like a lower case f without its line, and that was used for the double-S at the end of words like "duress". That would be "duresf". And we still have letters like that. Q is literally a K. Literally. C is either an S or a K, and its only real exclusive use is in "ch", which doesn't even make sense. We should have a character for ch. I'm pretty sure there's no instance of W that isn't just a U.

 

The Japanese syllabary is actually pretty rock-solid in most cases, as there only a few cases of ambiguous pronunciations, other than -su being truncated to -ss a lot for some reason, and the particle "wa" using the hiragana "ha"... for some reason. The major fault in Japanese is pretty much the kanji, probably. Those are entirely based on arbitrary memorization, so learning vocabulary with kanji is pretty much learning two vocabularies (three or more if you differentiate between on, kun, and alternate readings) at once. I can't think of a better system for a language with a strict set of syllables that relies on context almost entirely, but we're not talking about Japan's systems.

 

Switching language to make it spelled like it's pronounced is also something I don't think we'd ever really have a significant problem with. :S The point of it wouldn't be to make English harder, but simpler and more sensible. That's the whole point. So literally anyone who knows our alphabet could spell and read without issue.

 

I should point out that Canada (and actually every country that currently uses Metric) switched to Metric, disregarding its older generations, and they got along just fine. I think you're just kind of biased as a science major who's familiar with metric. You can't just say "yeah metric makes sense and we could change to that, but we couldn't change those other things I haven't spent a lot of time doing or becoming familiar with because then it'd be hard". /end @chimetals

 

Other gripes:

- We still associate the 24-hour clock with being exclusively for the military (who probably only use it because it's more convenient)

- We still use Month - Day - Year format. When have you ever looked at the date trying to find what month it is? You know what month it is. You want to know the day. It also just makes more sense to follow an ascending date order, though it makes more sense to descend when you're naming computer files.

- We still use Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit is totally arbitrary. Celsius, being tied to Kelvin, is both a much better scientific measurement, and a much more clear everyday measure, since we're mostly made of water. It's -10C out right now. My flesh was in danger of freezing 10C ago.

- I don't know how much of an issue it is since I haven't researched into it, but doesn't pretty much every other continent on the Earth drive on the other side of the road?

- Again, is there any other nation that tries to push creationism onto the education system?

[SilverAlchemic 355]

As far as the side of the road, being on the left is mostly a UK thing. The only example I can think of right now is Poland, because I researched it recently, but I'm pretty sure most of the world drives on the right. 

 

Looked it up, and never mind it's also in India, southern Africa, Japan, and most of Oceania. At least, according to this map, red being right and blue being left.

 

Edited 11 Feb 2014 by Silver Moon (see edit history)

[Knuckle 484]

We still use Month - Day - Year format. When have you ever looked at the date trying to find what month it is? You know what month it is. You want to know the day. It also just makes more sense to follow an ascending date order, though it makes more sense to descend when you're naming computer files.

 

I actually figured out why this is technically better recently. If you're using an archive that's ordered alphabetically and a lot of your files/papers have dates at the beginning, using Month/Day/Year format puts the items in chronological as well as alphabetical order. This is really useful for me as a photographer because if I have the following files with the names:

 

1/18/14

2/7/14

2/25/14

 

The month/day/year makes them chronological as well as aphabetical. With day/month/year format you get this:

 

7/2/14

18/1/14

25/2/14

 

So it's more beneficial to archivers and photographers who keep their pictures in huge archives ordered by date.

[Sahaqiel 1232]

That doesn't actually arrange them "alphabetically", it orders them by months and dates, but certainly not chronologically. If you used that format in the modern day, on computer storage, this is the kind of mess you would have.

 

01 - 20 - 2012

01 - 20 - 2013

01 - 20 - 2014

01 - 21 - 2012

01 - 21 - 2013

01 - 21 - 2014

01 - 22 - 2012

01 - 22 - 2013

01 - 22 - 2014

 

I just mentioned that that's why you would use Year-Month-Day format. Ascending and descending are legitimately the best way to go. If your photos or archives are years apart, you would want to know that information beforehand. This is how you arrange filenames chronologically.

 

2012 - 01 - 20

2012 - 01 - 21

2012 - 01 - 22

2013 - 01 - 20

2013 - 01 - 21

2013 - 01 - 22

2014 - 01 - 20

2014 - 01 - 21

2014 - 01 - 22