Nightingale

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Everything posted by Nightingale

  1. Yes. While use of marijuana for medical use is decriminalized here in California, it is still illegal under federal law, and companies can and do fire for positive drug tests. Personally, I do not use illegal drugs, but I also refuse to work for an employer that mandates drug testing without cause. I don't have a problem with a company testing employees who give the employer cause to believe the employee is under the influence at work, but random testing just says that a company doesn't trust me, so why would I want to work there? I've got some prescription meds for my migraines that can give misleading results on a test, and I don't want to find myself in a position of having to justify my medical history to someone when it is simply none of their business. In my opinion, it is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, and I want nothing to do with companies that have such policies. I know people with medical marijuana recommends that do the same. If a company wants a drug test, work somewhere else.
  2. What Quade said. Going from Elsinore to LA will put you in the middle of what's known as the "Corona Crawl". As for beating nighttime traffic, that starts about 3:00 and goes to 7ish. Personally, I'd hang out at the DZ and drive to LA late.
  3. I just finished reading "The Child Thief" by Brom. It's an incredible, fantastical and dark take on the Peter Pan story. It was awesome and I'd recommend it to anyone.
  4. This speaks only to Adam and Eve and that they were the first. It doesn't say the only.
  5. My roommate dropped her cell phone at some viewpoint in Bryce Canyon National Park. It was a really nice, brand new smartphone (don't recall if it was a blackberry or iPhone, but regardless, nice and pricey). She realized it a bit later, and panicked because by that point it could be at one of about fifteen places we'd stopped, and we had no time to go back and look. We went over to the lodge, and I told her to call the visitor center to see if someone had turned it in. She was pretty sure that electronics like that would probably end up in someone's pocket rather than turned in, but made the call (primarily to get me to shut up about it, I think). Sure enough, the visitor center had it and she was spared the $50 insurance co-pay on a new phone, and the annoyance that goes with it. She'd dropped it at Rainbow Point, which is at the opposite end of the park, at the very end of the road.
  6. Here in California, I have a friend who makes a living as a year round private swim instructor. She gets paid to drive to the houses of people with pools and teach their kids to swim. However, this is Southern California, and swimming year round is pretty common. I'm not sure how much money she makes, but she's got a decent standard of living and a new car, so I'm guessing she's doing okay.
  7. My phone used to have a lanyard type wrist strap. The cat loved it and would drag it around. Weird places it was found: 1. the catbox. 2. in the chinchilla cage, slightly chewed 3. under random household furniture 4. on the piano keyboard 5. on the top level of a six foot tall cat tree (now I know I didn't put it there )
  8. The interesting thing is that in the early church, clergy could marry and most early Christian leaders were married. Largely, the issue was about property, as the property of the Church was often all a priest had, and so he either had to give his children something that belonged to the church or give them nothing, and neither was socially acceptable.
  9. As a former teacher, I can tell you that's basically what they are. They're a factory where, no matter the quality of the initial material you're given to work with, you are required to turn out product that, when tested by quality control, produces passing results. We have a problem here of blaming teachers for students' failure to learn. In my experience, even the worst teacher will present the material (even if their only "presentation" was handing the student their textbook), and a motivated student will work to understand it, and an unmotivated student won't. What makes a great teacher is the ability to motivate students that don't care at all about what they're being taught. And even those great teachers don't reach everyone. If a student comes in to school having gone to pre-school, with a parent who is excited about education and stresses to the child how important it is to the child's future, who takes the time to read to the child and helps the child with homework and gives the child a quiet place to study, that child will probably be much more likely to succeed than a child who has a single parent who works two jobs and is never home and relies on the child to look after their four younger siblings while the parent is at work, takes the child out of school for various reasons, didn't give the child any academic foundation at all, and provides absolutely no support at home for the education of the child, and doesn't see the importance of education. Teachers get both of those kinds of students, and some falling in between. However, they are expected to turn out the same positive results for both students, when the second one really has the deck stacked against them. I don't know why when a kid eats too much sugar and doesn't brush his teeth and gets one dental exam every ten years and has never been taught to care for his teeth, we blame the parent and not the dentist, but when a child is equally unprepared to care for himself intellectually, we blame his failure on the teacher. I'm not saying it's never the teacher's fault or that teachers are perfect. I am saying that a student who wants to learn and succeed will do so despite an inferior teacher, while a student who has no desire to succeed will most definitely fail with an inferior teacher, and will probably not do so well with a great teacher either, given the home situation.
  10. I grew up under the year round school systemin Europe. None of the objections you have raised were an issue. I had 6 weeks off in the summer, more than enough to have a 1 month vacation. In Holland school vacations are times by geographic area. It would be unlikely your brother and mother would be in different geographic areas through elementary and secondary school. The benefits are there, it is abetter wya of schooling children. The issue here is that schools are using the year round system to have more students at one school. To use a simple example, students are divided into thirds, track A, B, and C. The school has a capacity of 400 students, and there are 200 students in each track, for a total of 600. For the first four months of the school year, track A and B have school, track C has a vacation. For the second four months, B and C have school, and A has vacation, and the next four months, C and A have school and B is off. Of course, A, B, and C aren't divided by months like the simplistic example above. Time off is in increments of several weeks at a time. So, my brother and I could live in the same school district, my mother could teach in the same school district, but if he was track A, I was track B, and she was track C, we'd never have any time together.
  11. Random sample of ~3400 people. That's a large enough sample to make the results pretty darn reliable and filter out all that socio-economic disparities you listed. You can see the 15 questions in the sample test, not sure about the other 17. Yes, but where did they get their random sample? If they stopped 3400 random people at Venice Beach in November (a known hangout for students from the local Catholic university), you would get different results than if you stopped people outside the Salt Lake Temple. I'm wondering how much effort they went into to make their study "random"... did they just pick people in one location, or did they pick people from different areas across the nation, and if so, what was the selection criteria, and was it truly "random"?
  12. Yes, but research indicates that those people had a male in the line somewhere, and males don't pass along mitochondrial DNA. There's an image attached indicating how this happens. (stolen from wikipedia. I remember seeing something similar in a genetics text from college, though) Also, the Bible is silent on the existence of other people at the time of Adam and Eve.
  13. Yes, but making more time in school mandatory because it would improve scores for a certain socioeconomic demographic isn't fair to the kids that would lose outside educational opportunities that are equally valuable if they were required to spend more time in the classroom. Let the option be there. I'd bet that most kids from low income families take advantage of that, if not from placing a value on education, then from not having to worry about who's watching your kids during summer break while mom and dad are at work.
  14. Actually, science seems to back that one up. Look up "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-Chromosomal Adam".
  15. No, providing optional summer enrichment would offer the opportunity to every student, not just those with enough money to go to camp, SAT Prep, and summer reading programs. When I was working on my MA, I worked with many children whose families would have loved to send them to enrichment summer school, but it cost money they didn't have. Enrichment summer school would provide all students the opportunity to continue their education during the summers, and whether or not to take the opportunity is their choice. If a child's family places no value on education, the odds of that child succeeding in school are very low, no matter how much more class time you offer. If a child's family values education, that child will usually do well, because even through the summer, their parents will be reading to them, making sure they stay caught up, and doing other things to further their education. We simply cannot force someone to value their education. What we can do is present the opportunity for them to learn if they want to. One of my high school teachers had a bumper sticker on her chalkboard that said "You can lead someone to knowledge, but you can't make them think."
  16. Not necessarily. They interpret the stories of Genesis as fables that are meant to teach about humanity's relationship to God, and God's hand in creation, whether it happened in seven days or millions of years. They're certainly not ignoring it, they believe it has value when interpreted in the context of the time period, and they're interpreting it in the way that many anthropologists believe it ought to be - an explanation about humanity's relationship to God, not a science book written by people without access to modern technology. The Catholic church has officially accepted evolution as a viable option. From Catholic.org "Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him." According to Pope Pius XII, "What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East" (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35–36) Where religion runs into problems is when it tries to teach the Bible as a science book, when that was not what it was intended for.
  17. I'd love to see the actual questions asked and where they got their sample. If they pulled their atheists and agnostics out of a graduate class in religious studies at UCLA and their religious people from rural Appalachia or inner city LA, you'd probably get very different answers than if you pulled the religious folks from a graduate class and the atheists from the inner city. I'd venture to say that probably 95% of the Christians I hang out with (admittedly, I live behind the Orange Curtain) would know that Martin Luther began the protestant reformation, and probably 80% of those could add that current knowledge holds that he probably did it by nailing his 95 theses to the door of a church in Germany. Maybe 1-5% could tell you that it was probably Castle Church (a.k.a All Saints Church) in Wittenberg, that Martin Luther was a Catholic priest and got himself excommunicated for his efforts. That question isn't so much religious as it is basic high school world history and a lot of people remember the main ideas but lack the details. I would also say that among the confirmed Catholics I know (and I know a lot...I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools most of my life), that 100% or close to that would say that the church teaches transubstantiation (and about 60% would remember the word for it). There are those who are part of the Catholic Church that believe that communion is symbolic and may have answered the survey question accordingly, but that is not the actual teaching of the church, and any Catholic who bothers to go through the sacraments (first communion, reconciliation, confirmation) knows it. I'm guessing that the group of Catholics interviewed also included "Christmas and Easter Catholics" and those that were baptized in the church but never bothered to learn more. My experience with the Catholic church was that the church really focused on teaching the congregation what it meant to be Catholic.
  18. Provide optional enrichment summer school. This could be done at very low cost, as to become teachers, students are required to do a certain amount of unpaid "student teaching" (unless the teacher has been hired on an "emergency credential", but those are fewer and fewer, as they've been made more difficult to obtain). Offer those student teaching positions in the summer, have one supervisory teacher per department (one for history, one for science, etc) to help with lesson planning and offer assistance when needed, and let the student teachers handle most of the classes. That way, the student teachers get their experience, and the kids get summer structure and additional time for academics. Also, if this is offered, students and parents who care about academics will have a tendency to accept the offer of free summer school, while the families that place less importance on academics are free to do other things.
  19. illustrating absurdity with absurdity , how bizzare , don't turn around ! I studied boarding schools when I was in grad school. I found it really interesting that research indicates that borders tend to do better in college and are more likely to go to graduate school than non borders. This is probably because boarding school teaches a certain amount of independence and responsibility for one's studies from the start. Interestingly, boarders tend to also indicate that they have a stronger relationship with their parents because the time spent together is more treasured and positive.
  20. When I was a kid, my parents would take us on long vacations (a month or so) to places we'd never been. If my brother and I had gone to year round school, chances are we wouldn't have been "off track" at the same time, and as my mother is a teacher, she wouldn't have had time off either, and our vacations would have been impossible. I think I learned more traveling than I ever did in school.
  21. Actually, she's right. The Koran forbids female infanticide. A Muslim woman doesn't change her name upon marriage, but keeps her family name as a sign of her own identity. The Koran encourages women to seek knowledge and education (Al-Mujadilah 58:11), and forbids men from denying women permission to go to mosques. Women were also allowed to own personal property that remained hers even after a marriage, and women were given inheritance rights that had previously been restricted to male relatives only. The Koran also states that men and women are born of one soul and are therefore equal (though not the same) in this life and the afterlife. Surah an-Nisa' 4:1. And, Islam does not blame Eve alone for original sin. They're both held responsible. While the rights of women were very progressive at the time of Mohammad and women were given more rights and freedom than they had in many other societies of the time, many predominately Muslim countries stagnated at that point while the rest of the world continued to grant more and more rights to women.
  22. I'm covered for pretty much anything, skydiving accidents included. However, I work for the police department, so I've got the same insurance the cops do. Sure, I don't get paid as much as I did when I worked in the private sector, but the benefits totally make up for it!
  23. 1. see your doc to make sure nothing serious is going on. 2. Try drinking Smartwater instead of regular water. It's got all the electrolytes like Gatorade without the sugar.
  24. >>> We deal with people in pain every day. There are obviously many (most) with legitimate pain that needs addressed. But chronic pain is not best treated in the ER, although acute exacerbations may need to be. We try to sort out who is legitimate and who (also many that we see) are simply addicted and drug seeking. I personally try to err on the side of treating legitimate pain and realize that I will be scammed sometimes, rather than hold out inappropriately on someone truly suffering. But it is judgement, and my judgement is not perfect. Electronic records linking all the ER's in the county help in sorting out who is drug seeking. All in all, a difficult situation from both sides of the fence. Yes, it is difficult for everyone involved. I agree that the ER is not the place for chronic pain patients in most circumstances. People in my situation have preventative meds (topamax and the like), treatment meds (imitrex, etc), and when all those fail for one reason or another, we end up in the ER because there's nothing else we can do to help ourselves.