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[Darvi]

IMO it's easy figuring out which u's and o's are silent, but maybe that's just me.

[Nadaka]

#1 trending topic on yahoo right now? "sex robots".

LOL

[Aklyon]

#1 trending topic on yahoo right now? "sex robots".

LOL

Any particular reason?

[Darvi]

No need to act so surprised.

[Delta Foxtrot]

#1 trending topic on yahoo right now? "sex robots".

LOL

Any particular reason?

My guess is on the 'HOOKERBOTS' thing from Your World.

[lordcooper]

I seem to recall reading that, for example, there were fewer people who actively practiced any sort of religion just after the end of WWII than there are now in the US. [CITATION NEEDED].

Maybe because there were less people in the US just after WW2 than there are now?

[Bauglir]

I guarantee that any statistics will, at the very least, be per capita instead of absolute numbers.

[kaenneth]

The pop music group LMFAO were on American Idol the other day; and the member with the cardboard box on his head goes by the name "Sex Robot", or so I have heard.

[Phantom]

Got drug tested 'cause some girls at my school were smoking weed. So, entire school testing.

Damn sure I know who sold it, too.

How fitting, fellow Californians, to keep up the stereotype.

[Lord Shonus]

I seem to recall reading that, for example, there were fewer people who actively practiced any sort of religion just after the end of WWII than there are now in the US. [CITATION NEEDED].

Secularism (not to be confused with atheism, which is a different concept) has always been common in the US. The reason it dwindled in the US in the middle of the twentieth century is a combination of the fear of being destroyed at any given moment by an outbreak of nuclear war, combined with the fact that the main rival state had made the extermination of all religion a cornerstone of its political goals. This led a huge number of people who simply believed, but had generally dispensed with the trappings, to rejoin the Church. This, combined with the rise of mass-media evangalism, is how the religious revival got going here. (Note also that this effect was far more prevalent in Western Europe, statistically. It wasn't until the late 1970's - early 1980s that Europe's revival began to fade.)

[Flying Dice]

I seem to recall reading that, for example, there were fewer people who actively practiced any sort of religion just after the end of WWII than there are now in the US. [CITATION NEEDED].

Secularism (not to be confused with atheism, which is a different concept) has always been common in the US. The reason it dwindled in the US in the middle of the twentieth century is a combination of the fear of being destroyed at any given moment by an outbreak of nuclear war, combined with the fact that the main rival state had made the extermination of all religion a cornerstone of its political goals. This led a huge number of people who simply believed, but had generally dispensed with the trappings, to rejoin the Church. This, combined with the rise of mass-media evangalism, is how the religious revival got going here. (Note also that this effect was far more prevalent in Western Europe, statistically. It wasn't until the late 1970's - early 1980s that Europe's revival began to fade.)

That was pretty much what I knew/had assumed. Not entirely unreasonable, given the sort of fear that people were living with and their inability to deal with that fear through rational means. The problem being that it isn't going away, as it is one of the driving forces behind a lot of the social problems we have now (re: orientation discrimination, a large part of the islamophobia thing, etc. etc.).


An unrelated WTF of the day for me: having to explain the concept of the arithmetic mean to a 22 year old university student.

[Lord Shonus]

Sorry if I came across wrong. I had some books at work today (published, incidentally, but the Communist Party OF Great Britain) that tried very hard (and very badly) to portray the prewar West as just one step from an atheist Utopia. It irritated me.

[kaenneth]

I really don't see much practical use for means vs true averages.

[kaijyuu]

An unrelated WTF of the day for me: having to explain the concept of the arithmetic mean to a 22 year old university student.

Oh man, so many people don't know the difference between a median and a mean that it's sickening.


Whenever someone says "the average" of something I always have to ask what they mean. Ex: "The average income is going up." They talking about the mean income, or the median income?

[Flying Dice]

Not at all. I was already aware that (barring a few groups of hardliners), the stance on religion in the US for most of our history was largely "meh", in that most people were technically religious but extreme devotion wasn't the norm. Of course, expecting fair, evenhanded treatment of anything from a Communist group is about as reasonable as expecting it from Joe McCarthy (well, perhaps a bit more reasonable, given that once you get past the whole historical dialectic thing, most communists aren't batshit insane).

ed:

An unrelated WTF of the day for me: having to explain the concept of the arithmetic mean to a 22 year old university student.

Oh man, so many people don't know the difference between a median and a mean that it's sickening.


Whenever someone says "the average" of something I always have to ask what they mean. Ex: "The average income is going up." They talking about the mean income, or the median income?

Oh, no, it wasn't even that. It was that he literally didn't understand the concept of taking the total value of a set of data and dividing it by the number of data values in the set. As in, he didn't understand the process of deriving the arithmetic mean, and looked at me like I was some sort of witch when I tried to explain it.