Who figured out this is a thing that works?

Would it have been a meme 20 years ago?

White collar engineers? Paying attention to blue collar techs? That’s the plot of the next Andy Weir novel, isn’t it? A hilariously naive notion of people working together to solve problems? Sounds like his work.

I couldn’t solve all the world’s problems if I was given this power, but it would make people who are damaged in the same way I am laugh for a couple months out of the year.

There needs to be a required summer semester of engineering school called “being a mechanic.”

Okay college boy, put on a shirt with your name embroidered on it and come out here into the shop. Yeah it’s 110 degrees in the shade, you’ve got your buddy Tom Midgly Jr. to thank for that. Now take this wrench and take that bolt out. Oh it doesn’t come out because the oil pan is in the way? I wonder whose fault that is. No, we’re not gonna let it cool before dropping the oil pan, the customer is in the lobby. Yeah. It is 240 degrees. No, it doesn’t all drain out through the plug, there’s a half quart that doesn’t come out. Yes, you’re getting that on you. Don’t get any of it on the interior of the car when you back it out. Now take off the oil filter. Yes, you’re gonna burn the back of your hand on the exhaust manifold. You’re taking every Toyota oil filter off this summer. You’re gonna hold the burn mark on the back of your hand up like Tyler Durden.

Oh you’re going to be an aeronautical engineer. c’mere boy, we’re gonna take the wings off a 152 Aerobat, you get to pick the spar bolts out of the catalog, we’ll safety wire the control cable turnbuckles through those little inspection ports you types are so stingy with, and then we’ll take the bird you just reassembled up for a couple two or three hours of spin training to see if ya done it right. You ever do a snap roll? I’ll teach you more about the aerodynamics of maneuvering flight in 1.5 seconds than your physics professor did in a semester. Eat bananas for breakfast, they taste the same coming up as they do going down. And buddy they’re coming back up. Because of the special jug bolt wrench I had to buy, I’m gonna pull at least one breakfast back out of your face using nothing but stick and rudder.

In English:

Braising: A method of cooking meat moist but not immersed in a fluid, often broth or wine, in a tightly sealed vessel over low heat for a long time, often used to soften tougher cuts of meat by rendering connective tissue into gelatin. “Roasts” are often braised. Compare with stewing, in which meat is cooked immersed in a fluid; contrast with barbecuing in which meat is cooked at low heat for a long time in a vented chamber flooded with smoke from a wood fire.

Brazing: A method of joining two pieces of metal by hard soldering using bronze as a filler material. The base objects are heated to cherry red, flux is applied to eliminate any oxides and bronze filler is applied to wet the surfaces and when cooled strongly bond them. Contrast with welding where the edges of the base materials are heated to melting and the puddles allowed to flow together such that when cooled they form one object. Brazing is often done when joining dissimilar base metals which cannot be successfully welded.

I like how they left “Lima” alone.

So you’re a normie who charge thay phone, eat hot chip and lie.

It becomes an issue when you’re in the habit of such poweruser tasks as plugging an external display or external graphics card into a laptop or dealing with bulk file transfers.

Long Live Buffalax!

You can pour cheap, bad wine into an expensive looking bottle and people will like it more. Marketing is pretty much all wine has going for it.

Chicken Parmesan is what happens when you take Italian people and put them in America. You take Italians, with the cooking methods they know, their tastes, and set them down in 19th century New York, they make Chicken Parm. This is a well-tested hypothesis.

That would be amazing, an automotive scarlet letter. Require them to sew a D for Drunkard on their shirts, both bumpers and both doors.

Pilot here, over been in the habit of using 12 hour for local time and 24 hour for zulu time. “12:45pm, 1745z”

Moss Cow! Moss Cow

Come and dance and love the fish

Mister Disco Summoned It

AHAHAHA! HEY!

I knew someone was going to make my point for me better than I ever could have.

I have voted Democrat in every election since 2006. That was a mid-term. I voted for Obama twice, Clinton once, Biden once, and Harris once. I voted no on North Carolina’s bathroom bill in 2016. Is this the behavior of a “transphobic alt-right nazi?”

No. Voting Republican is, like 13% of LGBTQ voters did. I’ve done more for LGBTQ rights than 1 out of every 8 American queers. Actually, probably more than that, probably closer to 1 in 6 or 5, because that 13% is out of those who bothered to cast a ballot at all.

So you get to miss me with that slander.

“Wokeness.” Allow me to reiterate: Andy Weir writes stories about the peoples of the world setting their differences aside to work together to solve problems using science. Stories of mankind’s greatest triumphs, our finest hours, are those of cooperation and evidence-based understanding of reality. Anyone who is actually woke, actually enlightened, would be overjoyed at seeing folks on the right embrace those stories. An actual enlightened person would be trying to think of more ways to get more stories like that in front of the right’s eyes.

What I see out of the self-styled “Woke” is absolute language policing. To the same or even greater degree than The Right, The Left, particularly the “inclusivity” enclave, demands obedient conformity to in-group norms. You will be declared an outsider and most heinous enemy if you say the wrong things, say things the wrong way, or talk to the wrong people. I am not your ally, not because I hate you, but because you make it impossible.

Specifically what should be in the curriculum? Well, the way I see it, school gets more and more useless the older students get. Elementary school is mostly on the money because reading, writing and arithmetic. We probably need to shake out some of the whitewashing that’s done in social studies class; all the “And then the Indians showed the pilgrims how to plant a fish with the corn seeds to act as fertilizer” shit but I think you get it.

Throughout middle school, they started letting kids choose the electives they wanted to take. For me this started out as “do you want to take Spanish, Band, Orchestra, Chorus or ‘Career Studies’?” There was one period a day that we didn’t ALL share in common. We need to do more of that, cater to students’ interests better. I think high school should have majors like college does.

The best education I find is when the environment simulates or actually is real work. Auto shop class in which real maintenance and repair is done to real roadworthy vehicles, conducted in an environment that simulates a service station is vastly superior to “Here are five random cars the owners abandoned with the school as a tax write off. They were broken when they got here and nine classes before you broke them worse. Take the wheels off and put them back on I guess.” My high school carpentry shop teacher treated us like employees of a general contractor, and we built a house. We would go to the job site, divide into work teams and work on a section of the building, from girder beam to shingles. I came out of high school not only with a head full of theory, but I was ready to walk onto a job site and work because I knew the job.

Shop classes have been disappearing. Students who didn’t take those, who took AP classes and such…what did they emerge from high school ready to go do as an adult?

I’m also of a mind to reject the notion that, you spend the entirety of your childhood and adolescence on school, and maybe even early adulthood if you go to college, and then once you’re done that’s it, no more learning now you work. That’s insane. “I’m in school.” “I’m out of school.” “I’m going back to school.” This notion of everything having to be multi-year curricula that must be entirely completed to earn a certificate and those four semesters of chemistry and physics don’t count because you failed persuasive writing so no future for you…it’s psychotic.

says his movies do good because he doesn’t do politics.

He’s almost certainly right. I haven’t encountered any significant our side/their side political mud slinging in his works. His two biggest hits, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, both feature nature itself as the antagonist, and all of society, everyone everywhere, setting aside their differences to work on solving the problem using the most powerful, righteous tools available: Science and Engineering.

Now, what cohort would you expect to try to cancel the author of books like that? The dogmatic, anti-science, fascist right wing? Nope! It’s the assigned-gendergaseous-at-tumblr crowd, because he does something other than recite the colors of the pride flag.

Which of those two groups did you expect to be the most insular and shunning? Was it the skinheads or the bluehairs?

Debate me, I guess.

As per your instruction, I shall.

I am a certified flight instructor, I have studied the fundamentals of instruction and can speak with authority on the subject.

it seems that some people think learning is a net negative or neutral for whoever is doing the learning and that one should learn as little as possible.

Learning is an active process. There’s a reason for turn of phrases like “spend time” and “pay attention,” these actions aren’t free. Any act of learning comes with a real cost in time, energy and likely money. It also comes with an opportunity cost. The time and effort a student spends learning could always be spent doing something else; resting, playing, working, caring for family, or learning something else. It is possible for those costs to be so great as to be a genuine net negative for the student. Especially when the reality of formalized school comes into play.

One of Edward Thorndike’s six fundamental principles of learning is the Principle of Readiness. This ties into Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. As a teacher, you have to always ask yourself “Where on their pyramid does my lesson fit? Is everything below that on their pyramid of needs well taken care of?” Your students will not be willing to pay attention in algebra class if they’re hungry, thirsty, sleepy, freezing or scared, because their needs for homeostasis and security aren’t being met well enough for an intellectual lesson such as higher math.

Okay, we got the kids fed, rested and secured. Now they should pay attention right? Nope. That isn’t good enough. Where on their pyramid does this lesson fit? What need of theirs will learning this satisfy? Genuine curiosity about the universe and its workings are always always always at the stabby point of the very tippy top of the pyramid, you want to satisfy that need you’ve got to categorically solve every other need these kids can have from romance to personal prestige. Schools and universities love the image of the career scholar, the men with SI units named after them who conducted experiments for the good of humanity…the reality is the very few extremely privileged people who got to play that game were old money wealthy, they owned land and had servants if not slaves to take care of all their material needs.

When a child asks why they have to go to school, they’re told that school is where they learn the skills they need to survive as adults. though Elementary school, you can take this argument seriously. Learning how to add and subtract is necessary for the basic act of paying for things, reading is the most OP skill you can have, reading clocks and calendars is demonstrably important, etc. That argument starts falling apart when you’re preventing people from going out and earning money to live so they can generate standardized test scores in pre-calculus algebra, or being told not asked what the symbology of the blue curtains in some novel is.

Because here’s another thing about the principle of readiness: It is the teacher’s responsibility to inform the students of the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “Someday algebra will save your life” is meaningless; we live in a world with quiz game shows, literally any trivia knowledge can be life changing. You have to be specific and realistic. Otherwise your students aren’t going to spend the effort, they’ll merely go through the motions, like pretending to be sad at a great aunt’s husband’s funeral.

Especially on Lemmy I’ve seen the argument that education shouldn’t be mere job training, it should be about ultimate enlightenment. Except we need to achieve a world where everyone can afford rent before we can play that game, Tiffany. And we haven’t. Survival skills come before abstract beautiful truths and if we’re honest we’re doing a piss poor job of both.

America flew nine manned lunar orbit missions in the 60’s and 70’s. Apollo 8 didn’t carry a Lunar Module, CM only. 10 did a low pass in their lunar module, 11 and 12 landed, 13 had to abort, 14-17 landed. We gave the rest of the world a 50 year chance to come in tenth and nobody did so here we go again.

Canada gets to umm actually for the rest of time because there was a Canuck on Artemis 2, the rest of you are now jockeying for 11th place.

Rarely. And I’m a ham.