Archive for September, 2016

5 results.

Ignorance vs Stupidity vs Bravery

Sep25
by on 25September16 at 1419

Ignorance vs Stupidity vs Bravery

Many people mix up the terms ignorance, stupidity, and bravery. I discuss these terms under the topic of education, because knowing or not knowing the difference between stupidity and ignorance makes a difference to people’s ability to learn. The reason for this is that many people use the term ignorance as if it were a stick and as something that a person should be ashamed of. Example: “You’re so ignorant that you’ll never learn (stupid is also used incorrectly here) . I put to you that everyone is ignorant of something. Ignorance is only shameful when a person is obstinately and willfully ignorant. Stupidity really has nothing to do with a person’s ability to learn either, except when someone is willfully ignorant. Example: I don’t know versus I don’t want to know.

I recommend that the next time someone attempts to use the term ignorance as a stick on you, that you tell them, “Ignorance is curable with the willingness to learn, while the stupidity of making assumptions about a person’s character is a personal flaw that, if it becomes a habit, is difficult to alter. Wait, no… perhaps not the second half of that. Too likely to start a fight. It is helpful to know the second half; however, as it helps stiffen the spine, when dealing with such situations.

Getting upset with someone who makes such character assumptions is a wasted effort, as they have only proven their own ignorance twice over. The first time by making an assumption in the first place and the second time by using the term ignorant incorrectly.

If an educator uses either ignorant or stupid as a stick, bat, or blunt object to beat up their student, it should be simply reported to the school system and that person should be educated by the school system, not the student or their parent. The student should be moved to a different class or a different school altogether if the educator is not dealt with appropriately.

The difference between these terms, along with other mean-hearted/cruel terms and appropriate behavior related to their use is something that children should be made aware of, as there is a high probability that a child will not bring it up to their parents.

For example, children often have difficult experiences at school, because they are unaware of good ways to deal with or respond to the mean and cruel things that other children or their instructors might say to them. The last thing a child (or anyone for that matter) should do is act upset or angry when in a confrontation, regardless of whether or not they are.

Taunt: Your momma wears combat boots!

Possible Responses: So. Who cares? / So. Is that important to you for some reason? / So. That means she’s strong and a fighter. / So does that mean your momma doesn’t?

Attitude and bearing are as important as the response. If you act afraid or flinch away, you mark yourself as a victim for future attacks. If you act aggressively, you are inviting the situation to escalate to a physical fight.

I recommend teaching children to fight, but advising them that it should always be a last resort. My father told me, “Never throw the first punch. You had better not start any fights, but if you get into one, you had better finish it” In other words, if you allow yourself to be beaten up by bullies, they don’t simply go away, they keep coming back for more.

Please discuss this with your children and by all means, post a few other taunts, regardless of whether you have come up with ideas for how to deal with them. We might be able to toss around a few ideas and come up with some good solutions. On my website please, or I likely won’t see them and chances are that only your immediate friends will get to see them:.

To post on the website: thewilesway.com

  • You have to be registered and the post has to be approved.
  • The website will not allow a lot of crude words to be posted, so if it won’t post, you will have to simply refer to what you mean.)

Assumption: A theory or belief that is accepted as true without proof.

Bravery: Acting in the face of danger in spite of fear and with knowledge of the danger, because it is the right thing to do.

Ignorance: A lack of knowledge/information/data.

Stupidity: Behaving without sense or judgement.

Taunt: A comment meant to anger, provoke, or wound.

This means that a person who acts poorly in ignorance, does so because they are not aware of all the facts, while a person who acts poorly with stupidity does so regardless of the facts.

Example of bravery: She ran into the burning house to save a child.

Example of ignorance: He died of smoke inhalation, because he didn’t know the house was on fire.

Example of stupidity: She refused to be helped by a thief, so she drowned.

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Your Body: The Best Chemical Lab in the World!

Sep19
by on 19September16 at 2205

Your Body: The Best Chemical Lab in the World!

If you want to feel better, eat better.

If you don’t feel good, the problem and solution may lay in your diet. About a year ago, I was too exhausted after work, to even think about walking even a mile. Just going grocery shopping caused me excruciating pain.

This year, after significantly changing my diet (and a few months to work up to it), I am now able to walk 10 miles a day. I have hopes that I may be able to run again in the near future.

What did I change? I increased my intake of vegetation to 2/3rds of my diet, I try to eat fish 2 to 3 times per week, and I eat 24 almonds daily.

The vegetation breaks down roughly into 1/3 fruits and 1/3 vegetables. Amongst these I include avocado, pineapple, apple, orange, celery, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, kale, spinach, banana, and honeydew melon. This list changes a little day to day, as I run out of some and get more, but I try to keep this core list available in my kitchen. How can I eat so many different items in a day. I don’t eat a lot of any one of them (about 1/8 cup for most items). How can I keep them on hand long enough for them to be useful, using such small quantities at a time? I throw them into a blender and freeze them in ice-cube trays (which coincidentally happens to come with 1/8 cup cubes). The better to make fruit or vegetable smoothies with.

The back pain and migraines crop up very rarely now and generally are only a reminder that I should get back on the diet (and by now I should know better, right?).

Side benefits: I am no longer feeling constantly dehydrated (side requirement for this drinking filtered water).

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Opinions: Everyone has One!

Sep11
by on 11September16 at 1343
“You must respect everyone’s beliefs.”
NO, You Don’t!
You have the right and obligation to allow everyone their own beliefs, so long as they do not infringe on the rights and beliefs of anyone else. After respectfully listening to their point of view, you then have the right to tell them, thank you for your opinion, but I’ll pass on that.
If you want to state your lack of appreciation for a person’s opinion more strongly you could tell the person, “You may keep your opinion, because I don’t want any part of it.” That person may never talk to you again and I would not recommend doing it unless the cause is truly important, but some bridges do have to be burned.
Notice I managed that very strong and confrontive statement without crudity of any kind?
If you want respect and consideration, you have to give respect and consideration.
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The Big Bad Oil Industry

Sep10
by on 10September16 at 1331

Stopping the oil industry will not solve any problems without a reasonable alternative. And by this I seriously mean a cheaper, easier to support, much cleaner, and safer alternative.

Right now the Big Bad Oil Industry supports us in getting to work and transports our food to the groceries, emergency services to our doors and back to the hospitals, raw materials to production facilities, and makes possible ever so many more things that we (today) consider to be the necessities of daily life.

We have wind farms and solar farms producing some power and some individuals have wind turbines and solar panels at their homes. It is expensive to install and maintain these options. I do not have the real numbers on the benefit to the individual in using these options. Having done some research on the matter, finding clear cut answers is not simple or easy.

Example:

Watts:

Required to run/support the use of a Refrigerator, Freezer, Water Heater, Stovetop/Oven, Microwave, Coffeepot (alternative hot water on demand, water heater for hot drinks), T.V., Computer and Modem/Router (multiplied by however many computers you are running in your house), and whatever other thing you might want to keep plugged in all day along with two or three lights and two or three other hot power outlets several times per day for random stuff, such as vacuuming the house or what have you. Household Calculation

Purchase Cost:

Installation Cost:

Plus the Damage Cost if you install it yourself and do it wrong:
This of course would vary, but has to be considered.

Batteries:

Because neither the wind, nor the sun are available all day every day.

Maintenance Cost:

Because you cannot just install it and expect it to run for the next 20 years to life without any maintenance.

Estimated Reoccurrence Maintenance Requirement:

Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannually, annually, biennially, Etc.

Replacement Cost: (Each part individually and the entire setup)

Everything wears out, especially batteries.

Estimated Reoccurrence Replacement Requirement:

Annually, biennially, decennially, Etc. Because replacement shouldn’t have to happen as often as maintenance.

Do you have a reasonable alternative to Big Oil to offer or any answers to the above questions?

  •   Watts:  Power, calculated using amps and volts. Example: Household light fixtures might take a 3-way lightbulb, that uses 30, 70, or 100 Watts.
    • Watt (W)=Amps*Volts
  • Amps or Current (I): The workhorse in electricity, amps are what run our equipment. As little as .1 to .2 amps is deadly. It isn’t the volts, which the big danger signs announce in the thousands of volts.
    • Amps=Watts/Volts
  • Volts (V): The factor in electricity that pushes amps along the wire. You might have thousands of volts and a relatively tiny amount of amps.
    • Volts=Watts/Amps
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Your Mind: A Stagnant Pond or a Fertile Playground

Sep10
by on 10September16 at 1238

I came across this question earlier today, while researching for something else and found people discussing and arguing over a bunch of awesome words that are niche-specific. These terms describe periods of time, which are most commonly used to identify and define other things or in financial reports. I could not find a single list/chart of these terms or a single word or phrase that includes these terms, perhaps someone can help me with this.

While doing this research, I read a post that hit on one of my sore spots, because it discouraged the use of the word Tertile, citing the complaint, “Why use a word that most readers will have to look up in a dictionary to understand?”. I don’t disagree that the term is unlikely to ever be a common use word, not even as common as its relative terms (such as quarterly and annually), but I do have a serious issue with the statement as a whole. Seeing as I do not wish to attack a person, but I do wish to attack a concept, I am bringing the problem here.

Quarterly is too hard a word for some people, but yet there is a time and a place for it. As such, it is a commonly used term gardening and in the world of finance and business, but far less used in other areas. Granted that I just can’t see “tertile” flowing off my lips in a sentence describing how often I do something… I have to file tertile reports (every three months or four times a year). It just doesn’t sound right, which means it will never be used, unless someone in a position of authority decides they just have to have a three month report and just love the term. No one is going to reach for this term automatically.

You might think triannually would work, but that is actually every four months and occurs three times a year and the popular term for that is quarterly. You might try to throw some terms together, like quadranually. It looks a little clunky, but it might catch on. (Quadrennially is every 4 years.)

The meat of this article:

I take exception to discouraging the use of less commonly used terms, just because someone might have to look something up. As shown in the example of quarterly (above), there are a lot of terms out there that are specific to tasks, such activities that are done infrequently and work related tasks that are fairly narrow to a specific type of field. Should we give up the word “rafting,” because I haven’t done it or talked to anyone about it in over 10 years? NO! Should we not learn what a cumulonimbus cloud is, because we don’t work in the weather industry? NO!

How far do we go before we say, “I know enough words and I don’t need any more for understanding the world around me and communicating with others.”? If we never learned new words (often accomplished after childhood by looking up words that we don’t understand or don’t see very often), we may as well all be grunting and pointing.

If you don’t know a word that someone uses or you find in an article, please look it up!

A stagnant mind rots from disuse, just like a scummy pond. The more words we know, the more creative we can be, because the variety of concepts a larger and larger word pool encompasses is just like using larger and larger numbers.

Given the digits 0 through 9 to create a two digit number, you have a relatively small number of possibilities for numbers that you can come up with. Assuming we’re working with whole or positive numbers, this gives you 90 possible numbers, because 0 through 9 are single digit numbers.  Every digit you add after that increases the number of possibilities exponentially. You can figure it out like this: If you have 10 you have 10 possible permutations. When you add a digit, you have 100 possible permutations, so times or multiplied by 10. 10×10=100, 100×10=1,000, 1,000×10=10,000. Simple, because to times by 10, all you are doing is adding a 0 at the far right of the number.

Learning is essential, not only to success, but to self-realization, world-realization, galaxy-realization, and universe-realization. What is your place in existence? If you are not willing and able to question everything and simply accept what you currently see or understand as “they way things are,” you will miss so many beautiful and wonderful marvels. You might accept many lies or myths as the truth. Granted that sometimes we find out that a myth was actually a reality that we did not understand yet, myths are often things we make up to quantify what we have to deal with in life, but have little to no grounding in reality.

If I learn about ambient today, I might also learn about ambient temperature, then I might decide to learn what can radiate heat and create a change in the ambient temperature. After that I might learn a better and more efficient way to heat our houses or melt ice off the roads. I could be amazing, but not if I don’t go out of my way to learn something new.

Quote: Once you stop learning, you start dying — Albert Einstein

Please learn, grow, and make every day of your life an adventure!

* Ambient: area around or surrounding

* Permutation: In math, the arrangement of numbers.

Note: If someone can come up with a better or nicer way to get this point across, I welcome recommendations.

2nd Note: If you don’t post your responses directly to my website, I probably won’t see it. I generally only see responses to my own Facebook posts, and which do not post to my website. And I have to approve posts, before anyone else can see posts submitted to my website. It cuts down on the unsolicited advertisements, viruses, spam, sheer rudeness, and profanity.

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