Since the general public doesn't seem to be interested in God anymore, we can start with the data and go from there. For example - fatherlessness creates more violent individuals and the data proves it, let's fix that.
One of my favorite stand-up routines talks about the infamous bumper sticker philosophy, and what happened when the person moved from a left-leaning location to a right-leaning one.
https://youtu.be/pKBKLeTZbM4
Hiya, Scott! I recently heard the first episode of Rationally Speaking podcast episode where you were the guest (yes, I'm catching up with the RS Archives during my long commute). I've also started reading QCSD (hey, if it's going to be our decade's GEB, we may as well give it an acronym. :: grin:: )
I've already corrected my very mistaken understanding of how QC works, as in the tagline of your blog. Are there any other concepts that we need to shake off that would make explaining these concepts easier for the layman? Do you have any words of wisdom for the masses?
Sure, you could shake off the idea (if you haven't already...) that quantum entanglement means communication faster than light. This is, interestingly, exactly the same kind of error as the one that says that a quantum computer is just like a classical computer but with exponential parallelism. Namely, you look at the resources that would be needed to simulate a quantum system using a classical system (faster-than-light communication in the one case, exponential parallelism in the other). You then confuse those with the resources that the quantum system itself provides you.
In reality, quantum mechanics is carving out a third profile of abilities, which is neither as weak as the classical profile, nor as strong as the thing that people mistakenly overcorrect to once you tell them that the classical profile is inadequate. E.g., you can violate the Bell inequality but NOT send instantaneous signals; you can solve factoring in polynomial time but probably NOT NP-complete problems. As I like to say (someone already quoted it elsewhere), it's a sufficiently strange state of affairs that no science-fiction writer would have had the imagination to invent it.
I can speak from my own experience; even though English is my first language, I entered as a grad student and TA in a public US university as a foreigner, since my undergrad degree was done outside the US. After they determined that I was capable of speaking understandable English, they actually made me an instructor of record for a 300-level course that none of the active faculty was available to teach.
I've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry, but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in [Languages].
A lot of the "rarity" with baseball cards was that they weren't inherently rare on release, but that the player on the card became a standout for the team afterwards, and therefore, owning the "rookie" card for them (when they were relatively unknown) was a game of patience and luck.
Also, baseball has a avid fanbase that is focused on statistics, and the back of the cards would have the player's stats. I don't doubt that the statistics were available in published manuals back then, but having them on a card made straight comparisons across players easier than flipping across multiple pages.
I have a small velvet bag that I use to keep my cell phone safe from scratches in my pocket. You can keep the fingerprint sensor on, but drop it in a similar bag with the sensor at the bottom; that way, you keep the fingerprint security, but there's an extra step involved before you can use it.
