You're basically correct, though it's usually done with 4 mechanisms making an adjustable glider loop, which can have any period of 43 or more just by increasing the spacing: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/P43_Snark_loop
I (as noted in another comment: Dove's husband and the father of the child in question) homeschool him. My wife and I both have graduate math-related degrees. We let him pretty much run wild with independent math research, while also making a point to probe for weaknesses -- last year I gave him the tests from some MIT Opencourseware calculus courses and about twice per year-of-calculus we ran into something he hadn't learned and spent a couple days working it up. On the future agenda is Gilbert Strang's linear algebra course, since there are full lectures online and everything.
What we did in past years was, largely, giving him unfettered access to math and math-related channels on youtube. Vi Hart, Numberphile, 3blue1brown, stuff like that. When he showed interest in something specific, we'd get him appropriate materials. Since his elementary school was a public montessori school, his teachers encouraged us to send him with appropriate math workbooks for his capability level.
yes but they're missing the take-the-radio-apart or take-the-computer-apart or fit-whole-instruction-set-in-one's-head advantage that earlier eras were granted.
"What if there is no Internet?" No computer? Etc...
Papa (grandfather now, raising my granddaughter because... not important, lol) tends to impress the young ones with what can be done with what is in one's head.
I am hopeful. But maybe also naive.
The other idea I like to link to these skills is "thought is action" type mastery. And, just to be clear, that is a state of clarity coupled with having grokked[0] something valuable.
Having realized that state many times in my past makes it easier today. I can go there and perform, doing or dealing with whatever it is efficiently and effectively.
It also can mean agency where ones peers may well lack it.
[0] - ...having achieved a state of understanding so complete it is a part of us, who we are, automatic, almost instinct.
The take things apart has become obfuscated by modern technology design. Most devices these days just drop one of a dozen chips into a circuit board as it's brains. Program it, and then ship it. More or less black boxing the device. It's one of the reasons the supply chain hit a lot of tech hard, those few chips were low cost and plentiful ... Until the knock on effects of the supply chain issues happened and they weren't as profitable to make compared to the high prices chips companies like auto manufacturers were bulk ordering for a premium.
Fascinating few years, a whole generation of designs rendered unusable - complete designs trying to be reworked for the chips they could get a hold of.
"Conway's Game Of Life" is a game of cells on a 2d grid that live/die/reproduce based on how many neighbors they have.
As a result of the game rules, you can get simple behaviors like "everything dies" or "everything is stable". But you can also get more complex behaviors, like things growing for thousands of turns before eventually collapsing and then stabilizing into a few fragments here and there. And you can get behaviors that don't stabilize -- like shapes that evolve in a way that after a certain number of turns the whole shape has moved along the grid ("gliders" or "spaceships") or oscillators of various periods.
Quite a while back there was a loop discovered that allowed for a period 43 oscillator, which could be adjusted by just moving things farther apart and therefore allowed every period of 43 or more. And oscillators of most smaller periods had been discovered -- but 19 and 41 were still unknown, up until both were discovered in rapid succession by 2 different people. So now we know how to make an oscillator for any given period within Conway's Game of Life.
We (I am Dove's husband) have 2 other children. The 7 year old builds electric circuits (takes after his grandpa who worked for NASA and HP before becoming a pastor), and the 2 year old mostly makes engine noises while driving his monster trucks around the living room.
The seven year old can make an electric motor out of spare parts (batteries, magnets, wires), and routinely makes electromechanical Minecraft contraptions that I don't comprehend.
We just hope they choose to use their powers for good.
My 7 y.o. can explain a motor but we haven't tried building one, I was eyeing him sets online and was between a few.
I built him a loop in MineCraft redstone to power his randomly-timed spooky lights in his "the backrooms" (SCP), but I don't know how to use the newer redstone stuff and haven't found a (educational) use-case to built him anything with the redstone torch/NOT logic gate etc.
Can I say it one more time? Get him building eurorack modules. It's like legos for sound. So many possible combinations! Everything is voltage controlled, so the output of anything can be inputs for anything.
And you get to build lots of cool circuits. Designing your own isn't hard, you can get really far with just op-amps and resistor/capacitor circuits.
some of the resistors are potometers, of course. So you have some knobs to turn.
But it is usually bog-standard chips. op-amp, simple gates, 8-bit buffers.
I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family.
When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.
> Your style of debate is _not_ working, my guy. Your comment history in other threads seems to paint a picture of you not really arguing in good faith.
Downvotes are a signal that others have that perception of you.
That's generally true, but I don't think it is in this case, as when I argue about this I argue in good faith. When people downvote someone for saying that one cannot claim to care about animal welfare while paying for their exploitation, I can be generally certain that the reason for the downvotes is because they don't like having cognitive dissonance pointed out.
Do you have specific suggestions for what would be a more reasonable way to point out such dissonance?
Look back over your comments from the last couple weeks. You've routinely made comments about people being afraid to talk to you, or said you hope they find the courage they currently lack. The way you carry yourself in general, you act like you think you can teach others but they can't teach you, and many of your critiques tend toward simplistic snark that you think should be conversation-ending. Your supposition that people downvote you simply because they don't like having cognitive dissonance pointed out (even when other vegetarians and vegans are telling you that you're hurting the cause) suggests your sense of self-righteousness does not come with the requisite degree of self-awareness.
I think the majority of the first part of what you've said is mostly captured in "you act like you think you can teach others but they can't teach you", so I'll respond to that first:
I am open to being taught, I just expect something better than silliness like "I can care for animals and also eat them for pleasure" when it comes to what I find convincing. Please, by all means, teach me something. I am genuinely open to it. If you read through the many conversations I've had on this topic in the past, you'll also find thorough explanations as to precisely why I find these carnist arguments so tired and ineffective. Just because I am once again, for the umpteenth time, saying that people who claim to care for animal welfare while actively harming animals are hypocrites doesn't mean I'm close-minded, it just means that this delusion is ubiquitous.
> many of your critiques tend toward simplistic snark
This is probably more true than I would like to admit, but in my defense I am arguing for what I know to be the ending of the subjugation of trillions of sentient creatures, so forgive me for being _extremely_ upset when I need to convince people of what is an obvious truth: one cannot claim to value animal welfare while participating in the unnecessary abuse of those animals.
> even when other vegetarians and vegans are telling you that you're hurting the cause
Being a vegan or vegetarian does not make someone more likely to know what is good for the cause. Knowing what makes an effective social movement is a completely different area of knowledge, so the fact that other folks who eat fewer or no animals disagree with my strategy doesn't say much.
> "I am arguing for what I know to be.... obvious truth" ... "delusion" ... "hypocrites" ... "silliness" ...
and this is why. Again, look up "cage-stage Calvinism". Nobody ever has a good conversation with a cage-stager because they're so busy talking about "obvious truth" and "delusion" and not really listening, just sort of generically pattern-matching and then declaring their doctrine.
I read a couple articles on it when you first mentioned it. I see what you're saying, I just don't think it applies in this case. I think you're either trying to say that outrage over great evil is either always unwarranted, or that perceiving something as being a great evil is always wrong, or that the concerns about the treatment of animals in modern society doesn't count as a great evil. But I disagree with all of those things. There are some pretty significant differences between an outraged zealot and an outraged rights activist that come into play here.
> not really listening
I have listened for multiple decades. I listen to others talk about it at _great_ length. You can continue to simply believe that I am deaf to reason, or acting unreasonable in some way, but that's simply incorrect. You make it seem as if I am digging my heels in despite evidence that anything I say is wrong/unsound/false, but that's simply not the case.
None of the above, but this is more of the same issue. You're interacting with my words, but you're so quick to jump to a defense that you haven't really heard me.
"Do you have specific suggestions for what would be a more reasonable way to point out such dissonance?"
You could start by being open to the possibility that your position is not the absolute truth.
And then maybe make arguments as to where you think the other arguments are not consistent, instead of snarky comments very close to personal insults.
In other words, focus on the arguments and not the person.
More concretely, you understood my position wrong, and then made a self evident conclusion in your head - and shared that conclusion. Which is not very advanced debating style.
> You could start by being open to the possibility that your position is not the absolute truth.
I have done that. In fact for decades I was convinced that the exploitation of animals was okay/fine/moral/necessary, etc.
The open-mindedness that you encourage was the catalyst for believing so strongly in this.
> And then maybe make arguments as to where you think the other arguments are not consistent, instead of snarky comments very close to personal insults.
That's exactly what I've done. I said the argument is silly because it is self-contradicting. And what psuedo-insult are you referring to?
"The human brain is a wild thing when it can form this single thought and think it to be consistent."
How is that not an insult to my brainfunction?
"In fact for decades I was convinced that the exploitation of animals was okay/fine/moral/necessary"
And the point is, we are not talking about vegetarism here. At least I am not. I am talking about avoiding unnecessary animal suffering.
So you say eating meat is unnecessary in general. Fine, that is your opinion.
My opinion is different, I believe to my body it is necessary, or at least I am better off with meat, than without.
Now you could try to change my opinion by providing me with studies saying vegan livestyle is better or as healthy (to which I would likely respond with, "yeah I know that study, those are the flaws preventing a generalisation"). But you did not do this.
And if you want to know why I believe eating meat is allright?
Because there would be no more trees, with no pretadors eating the deers and co. and I like trees as well. So nothing moraly wrong with killing and eating meat for me.
But putting the animal in miserable conditions is indeed unnecessary suffering to be avoided and not allright with me.
What exactly is not coherent in that line of thought?
I didn't say your brain, I referred to brains in general. Mine is capable of the same dissonance. If you thought I was trying to personally insult you, then I'm sorry; I can see why you'd read it that way but that wasn't the intent. I'm insulting _everybody's_ brain function, my own included.
> I am talking about avoiding unnecessary animal suffering.
Veganism is a philosophy based solely on this principal, so by discussing animal welfare in any context, we are effectively discussing veganism and animal ethics. I say all of this because we _were_ talking about "vegetarianism", as you put it, even if you claim that we weren't.
> Now you could try to change my opinion
But I wasn't trying to. I was just pointing out the dissonance for you to do what you want with. I'm not interested in trying to convince you of anything - it's your job to convince yourself.
> Conclusion: you want to know why I believe eating meat is allright?
Suppressed Premise: Eating meat is okay if it keeps trees on Planet Earth
> Premise B: Because there would be no more trees
> Premise C: But putting the animal in miserable conditions is indeed unnecessary suffering
> What exactly is not coherent in that line of thought?
This is incoherent because premise B is untrue, and generally the conditions that animals raised for meat in violate premise 3.
You should update your comment to include the original Clicker Heroes by Playsaurus. What you've presently linked to is the sequel, which is radically different in terms of both look and gameplay.
Overall Denver is less white than the US as a whole, but has some neighborhoods that are almost entirely white (take a look on https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html ). You can hang out in, say, Cherry Creek or Wash Park and see almost entirely white people. Go to Park Hill or south Feds and you see very few white people.
software engineer salary somewhere else is usually more like 20-25% less rather than 50% less -- someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver. They'll pay 5k less in taxes (both due to lower total income and lower state tax rates). So saving 18k in housing costs puts them at least in a comparable disposable-income range.
For people in lower-paying careers, the lower housing costs elsewhere almost always dwarf the pay differences. For higher-paying careers, the pay differences are the dominant factor. Mid-range software engineer salary is actually pretty close to the dividing line, which makes it particularly important to evaluate the specific numbers yourself.
As someone who was looking at the data on glassdoor while writing my comment, and who has dealt with offers from recruiters, and who has an extensive network of friends who are open about their earnings, I call bullshit on your calling of bullshit.
There are certainly outliers. There are certainly people with excellent skills who are being underutilized, and who will get paid a lot more if they find the exact right fit. Just a wild guess, but you didn't go from 35k in Pittsburgh to 140k in SF, you went from a lot more than that in Pittsburgh to a lot more than that in SF. If you're up in the 200k+ range in software in SF, you'd probably earn a lot less going anywhere except maybe NY or Boston. But if you're in the "average software engineer salary" range in SF, the falloff going to a mid-sized city is not nearly as steep.
> But if you're in the "average software engineer salary" range in SF, the falloff going to a mid-sized city is not nearly as steep.
But that is exactly why Engineers want to be in SF! Other markets won’t compensate you nearly as well, or increase your compensation as much, as companies in the Bay Area.
However, if one has a family and kids, I could see moving to a city with more affordable housing and good schools as a worthy trade off.
"software engineers" in SF aren't making 140k either.
If you look across several software-related job titles that are around 140k in SF (you may have to include terms like "lead" or "senior") you'll find Boise salaries to be closer to 3/4 than 1/2. Some are a little lower, some a little higher. Denver tends to be a little higher than Boise but still well below SF. Housing costs in Denver are also considerably higher than Boise and considerably lower than SF.
Which goes back to my original point: that it's particularly important for people in that approximate salary range to run the numbers for themselves and their own situations. While for people making a lot more the higher salary easily dwarfs the CoL and for people making a lot less the CoL easily dwarfs the salary, for people making not-particularly-exceptional salaries within the general software field, the numbers are similar enough that the specific offer + your specific housing need + other personal details can make the difference.
Your own data contradicts your argument. Assuming you're using Glassdoor as a reference like you mentioned, than Boise engineers make $85k and SF engineers make $145k - I am not filtering by title for either of those.
My anecdotal experience is engineers in SF make more than $140k, and engineers in Pittsburgh make less than $85k (although this is probably no longer true with all of the self-driving startups there now). I would suspect engineers in Boise make less than Pittsburgh, but I've never talked to anyone there.
> "Boise engineers make $85k and SF engineers make $145k"
if you click on the Boise link you provided and change the city to SF without making any other changes, it shows about $125k, not $145k. 145 is if you add "senior" to the title.
I haven't checked Pittsburgh, and I'm not trying to make an exhaustive list. Just making a more general point -- run the numbers for yourself, based on your specific offers and your specific needs. Because you might find that you personally can make >140k in SF and <85k in Pittsburgh and won't come close to making that up from taxes and CoL. Someone else might find they can make 140k in SF and 120k in some other city and easily make up the difference through taxes and CoL.
> software engineer salary somewhere else is usually more like 20-25% less rather than 50% less -- someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver.
Worth pointing out that this function doesn't work for inputs much higher than $150k or so, and doesn't even work at points like $140k depending on the particular candidate.
Boise is absorbing a lot of people who either can't afford to live in California any more, or don't like California's political environment. Boise is currently the fastest growing metro area in the US.
This is happening in a lot of mid-sized cities in the western US. California's economic / housing policies result in very high cost of living, which causes a significant migration of poor people out of the state and into places like Boise, Denver, Las Vegas, Beaverton, Fort Worth, and so on.
