Interesting Links for 16-12-2013

[andrewducker]

• The war on e-cigarettes
  (tags: nicotine europe smoking viasupergee )
• The boy whose brain could unlock autism
  (tags: autism psychology brains )
• Fox Does It Again
  (tags: SamuelLJackson FoxNews funny satire )
• I got yer underwater steampunk co-op rogue-like right here!
  (tags: games steampunk ocean )
• Grammar schools don't boost social mobility, Ofsted

Comments

[naath]

Grammar schools> as a former grammar school pupil I would say that "Grammar schools are "stuffed full" of middle-class children" is so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever set foot in one that I can not see why it is NEWS.

[del_c]

I agree, but mentioning class privilege is like mentioning racism, sexism, and global warming. It may not be news to say yet again "yes it exists, and here is even more evidence", but it's worth doing because if you don't, then the denialists win the field by default.

That conservative who says grammar schools would be mobility-enhancing if there were more of them, is making no sense: if you expanded the grammar school system to take in 100% of middle class children and some percentage of working class children below 100%, that would still be Advantage Middle Class. If you expanded the grammar school system to take in 100% of working class children, that's called Comprehensive Education. The only way to have both selective education and zero class privilege is to have the same percentage of middle class children be denied selective school entry through insufficient merit, as working class children are. (if you believe middle class children are inherently more meritorious, bless you)

[naath]

I'm think it's close to impossible to test children for "academic ability" without also testing "how good has their schooling to-date been"... and middle-class parents are better at getting their children a better education (for a whole raft of reasons; including of course "they have money to spend on it).

The war on e-cigarettes

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, I keep wondering if there's some good reason I'm not seeing, but it really does seem to be just "people feel it's slightly 'naughty' somehow, so let's ban it". The same thing that seems to happen to lots of other things ("soft drugs, ick!", "sex? ick!", "sex work? ick!", "poly, ick!", "bdsm, ick!" etc)

I literally don't understand how people haven't noticed the "save people from dying of cancer" angle...

Or are governments acting to protect the tax on cigarettes? I hope not :-O

Or, I mean, it's possible nicotine is SO DANGEROUS. I generally prefer not to have widespread use of even fairly harmless drugs, just to be on the safe side. But it seems less harmful than lots of other things, and "banning everything" doesn't seem to help.

Re: The war on e-cigarettes

[bart_calendar]

People have accused me of "trying to addict them to nicotine" when I've used my e-cig in public.

Re: The war on e-cigarettes

[andrewducker]

Nicotine _is_ dangerous. But only in large amounts. If you can give it to people in self-regulated small amounts, without them inhaling awful burning smoke along with it, then that's a vast improvement over smoking.

[ajr]

The war on e-cigs is stupid. Sure, nicotine in large does is harmful, but what isn't? In a standard cigarette, it's the tar and everything else that's vastly more harmful, *not* the nicotine. So e-cigs are hugely safer, an excellent incentive to stop smoking the bad stuff (I know several people who use them), and pretty much an all-around good thing. Restricting or criminalising them is stupidity of the highest order, as it only reinforces ignorance about them.

(Don't smoke myself, but Voltaire (para.))

Dawkins responds on the death of the Selfish Gene

[cartesiandaemon]

I heard real biologists talking about this and still didn't understand. My best impression was

Re: Dawkins responds on the death of the Selfish Gene

[lil_shepherd]

As Dawkins points out (and links to) Jerry Coyne on Why Evolution is True has written one of his absolutely clear critiques on this.

Why do Americans write the month before the day?

[cartesiandaemon]

I assumed it was because they pronounced it like that, but I don't know if America does do "Jun 1st" more often than "1st Jun" more than the rest of the world? It's not obviously wrong until you add the year, presumably for whatever reason they got stuck with it then?

I agree with XKCD that YYYY-MM-DD is right, because AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM so it's unambiguous.

[spacelem]

I've been making an effort to try to write YYYY-MM-DD recently. It does look a bit odd, but I'm getting used to it (and it's great for naming files, as it makes sorting trivial).

[soon_lee]

That's also why I do it.

[inamac]

I learned to use YYYY-MM-DD when I was cataloguing journals for the British Library in the days of microfiche as it's easily machine-readable.

My problem with the Month/day/year format is that it puts two sets of numbers together (December 17 2013) which is confusing - I suspect that the US usage comes from writing documents where the year was usually omitted because it was a known quantity.

How is the Declaration of Independence dated?

[rhythmaning]

The thing about USAian dates baffles me. It makes no sense, either way. Back in the 1980s, my mother (who worked abroad) had a US $ bank account. The tellers refused to accept a $ cheque because they thought it was predated...

yyyy-mm-dd is great for filing documents, of course!