rjshae

I suspect that the primary benefit of gifted programs is to avoid boredom by the students because they don't have to wait on slow kids. If a teacher spends 80% of their time instructing 20% of the kids, that's not an optimal classroom.

Liquid Gallium Shown to Break Down Carbon Dioxide Intriguing. I'm curious to know how well this could work in a manned spacecraft. Maybe it needs a method for separating out the solid carbon in the absence of gravity?

Why does this sound like a Taliban advert? Yeah, if you keep the women locked away at home and don't report domestic violence, I'll bet your stats look pretty good.

Unfortunately, politics will always be stupid. It's the nature of the beast. Things were no better 20 years ago.

The bitter cold is mainly east of the Cascade mountains. To the west in the maritime zone we get a ton of cloudy weather, but that helps moderate the temperature. There is a coastal retirement community in WA called Sequim that lives in the rain shadow of the Olympics. They only get 15 inches of rain annually and have their own native cacti. (Compare to the Hoh Rain Forest which gets over 200 inches per year.)

They increase their ratings by focusing on issues that generate a strong emotional response. *gasp* I'm talking about the evening news, of course.

I have some hidden hearing loss myself. The worst though is speaking to some guy who is wearing a mask and doesn't enunciate well. It basically comes out as, "Blah-blah blah blabab and blah bah-lah. Okay?"

I wonder if they ever trolled him with Yakety Sax?

Some people get tetrachromacy, which gives them greater color sense. I wonder how long it would take your brain to adapt to the enhanced vision? Reminds me of At First Sight.

A Gene-Editing Experiment Let These Patients With Vision Loss See Color Again

A little nerd humor...

Now it's only 30 years away.

Guess where Trump won the election in 2016: the rust belt.

I think a lot of this is being driven by America's relative decline in power. Many of the people supporting the Trumpian faction have been hurt economically by the loss of manufacturing in the US. Unfortunately for them their central figure is not quite right in the head, or perhaps their movement would be more potent and effective. Trump isn't an effective strategist, at least not in terms of the national interests.

The actual number of civilian casualties in both conflicts can only be estimated, but those estimates are typically in the six figures: the estimates for Iraq are ~200,000 and for Syria are ~500,000. Typically the US uses more expensive precision weapons that limit damage to infrastructure, and probably to civilians to some degree. They're both horrific conflicts, comparable to the Spanish civil war. Iraq will probably bounce back better because of its extensive oil resources.