College Education

[JMU DJ]

Are we supposed to be impressed, inspired, horrified, pissed off, all of the above, or none of the above, DJ?

All of the above. Now grovel at my knees you uncouth ingrate.



... and Mark, I know you know what a Chanticleer is, I was just giving you shit for "fixing" my post which didn't need fixing.

[JohnStOnge]

.... I guess nobody really needs anything from college to do most anything. The Engineers (always capitalize Engineer) that built the pyramids didn't need no sissy college courses....

Er, what was your point...?

My point is that Engineers could function just fine as Engineers without having to take courses in things like English Literaure, philosophy, foreign language, etc. And I think you really know that's true.

[JohnStOnge]

Like drinking and driving = I happen to see a correlation there and so do most doctors and nurses who work in the emergency room

I hate that the drinking and driving thing was raised in this thread, but I think I must respond. I clearly stated in my posts on the subject that there is an association between drinking and risk of accident. In general and on average, as blood alcohol rises risk of accident (and fatal accident) rises.

The point is that there are associations between many behaviors and risk of accident. Not getting enough sleep. Possibly things like talking to other people when you are driving. Speeding. Tailgating. Failure to yield.

But for some reason this culture has singled out driving with alcohol in one's system for special derision. While we can treat somebody who was going 100 in a 70 mph zone as a mere traffic violator, we act as though somebody driving below the speed limit with a BAC of 0.10 is a criminal at some other level.

We also lose sight of the fact that driving with a BAC of, say, 0.09 does not necessarily mean someone is likely to get into an accident. In fact, in most cases, it is very UNLIKELY that someone driving on a particular excursion with a BAC of 0.09 is going to get into an accident. It is not like somebody driving with a BAC of 0.09 is "probably going to kill somebody." In fact, way more probably than not...WAY more probably...they are not.

That is not a "simplistic" way of looking at things...a way of looking at things in which one is not considering interrelationships, etc. The simplistic way of looking at things is to say, "There is an association between BAC and increased risk of accident, therefore we must impose draconian penalties on people who drink and drive."

[JohnStOnge]

JSO lives in a discrete universe, you live in a continuous one.

I don't think you could be more wrong about that. What I would say, though, is that people sometimes try to use continuous distributions to obscure situations that can be reduced to discrete questions. For example: You will see people obscure the question of homosexuality by using the concept of a continuim of sexual preference...different degrees of orientation towards or between sexes. But the question can indeed be reduced into discrete terms such that there are three possibilies: 1) Preference for sexual contact with members of the opposite sex, 2) preference for contact with members of the same sex, or 3) no preference.

[native]

Are we supposed to be impressed, inspired, horrified, pissed off, all of the above, or none of the above, DJ?

All of the above. Now grovel at my knees you uncouth ingrate.



... and Mark, I know you know what a Chanticleer is, I was just giving you **** for "fixing" my post which didn't need fixing.

The post is only worthy of puking on your shoes. And I can project far enough that I won't need to bend down. Sorry.