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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • help me get started

    You mean help her get started, right? Science fair is for kids, after all.

    As a has-been science fair dad the best advice I can give: pick a different project. If you want to build a voice activated drawing robot with her at home, go for it. Sounds like a wonderful time and a great project for a girl interested in robotics.

    It’s a bad science fair project for a primary student. Science fair projects, first and foremost, need to be the entrants own work. They should be able explain the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of all the steps and actually be able to do them. “[Dad/Mom]…” can be an explanation sometimes, but not this time. Second, unless it is an ‘engineering’ fair, it need to contain a testable hypothesis that is, you know, tested. If your project does not primarily involve measuring something, it’s almost certainly not right for a science fair. Third, rein it in a bit. You have chosen a huge project. It’s the kind of thing that could genuinely take months of your time even as an experienced roboticist. At least for a young kid, pick something where the write-up is most of the work. You should be able to do 90% of the experimental work in an afternoon. It can take longer to finish, but in a ‘checking in’ kind of way; waiting for mold to grow or an egg shell to dissolve.

    Not trying to be a dick, but I really believe sticking with this project is setting you both up for failure.











  • I’m not surprised at the study. It’s basically impossible to control for between individual variation sufficiently without an RCT, but that will never happen with spanking. There will always be this problem of which end to label the cart and which end to label the horse.

    I guess I’ll also poke the hornet’s nest while I’m here…

    I don’t really have a problem with corporal punishment. Not for children, or adults, when appropriately administrated. I say this a person who has firsthand experience with a public school that utilised corporal punishment and an angry parent just taking it out on you for being a kid.

    At school a paddling was just another step in the process. You’d lose recess time, you’d have to clap erasers or write lines, you’d get sent to the principal’s office and then and only then get a paddling on you return trip if you kept it up. There always had to be two witnesses and the teacher who sent you down wasn’t allowed to do it. If that still didn’t work they would call your parents to come get you and paddle you again. The last one basically never happened

    It was so different from someone who was angry at you just trying to make themselves feel better that I could easily recognize it even as a small child. It always baffles me when people deny any daylight between the two, I assume it’s born out of a very fortunate ignorance. I never felt unsafe at school. It never diminished my trust in anyone there. If I got paddled at school—I knew it was coming, I knew exactly why, and I knew I could have made a sensible choice to avoid it. That was not the case at home.

    The other reason is the moral one. I never see people with well behaved children claim you can forego punishments entirely and I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why intentional emotional harm has more virtue in it than intentional physical harm. Because that is what the alternatives are: isolation and deprivation. A time out isn’t harmless, losing recreation and exercise time isn’t harmless, they just don’t leave marks you can see.









  • Not only did you not read the article, but you apparently don’t know that much about TMI either. There are multiple reactors at TMI, the one that had the accident is not the one they’re restarting.

    The one they’re restarting shut down a few years ago, along with several other nuclear plants, due to being too expensive to compete on cost with all the cheap gas post fracking boom.

    Yes, for reasons passing understanding the state and federal government allowed existing, functional nuclear plants to close in favor of natural gas plants.