That's the ideal, but I don't think it matches up to reality. I don't think, for example, that Vincent van Gogh's art made him happy, or that Robert Oppenheimer's work on the atomic bomb made him happy. I'm not even sure that, say, Mother Teresa's years combating poverty made her "happy" in the way that most people…

A philosophical question:

Interesting! So maybe benchmarks would be a reasonable model to apply to teachers as well. Come up with certain criteria for student success and figure out what percentage of students have to meet each criterion. I still don't think standardized test scores should be the primary measure, though.

Not to knock the awesome technical achievements on display here, but looking at these pictures, I'd sooner board a rocket out of Kerbal Space Center.

Obviously you know a great deal more about physician accountability than I do, but I should clarify that I'm not talking about malpractice or nebulous insurance incentives in this comparison. I'm talking, to make it simplistic, about being penalized for the patient who won't take his pills, or who is genetically…

This is exactly what worries me about assessing penalties for poor teacher performance. There's got to be some way to introduce accountability into the system without punishing people for factors outside their control (which, realistically, are most factors).

Yes, but how do you objectively determine who's a bad teacher?

I'm in favor of accountability, but the problem is twofold:

Nope! First barrel attempt was 53 years later. (The first unprotected jump was 19 years earlier.)

It's a shame that motion pictures were still half a century off - the Falls starting up again would make an amazing early movie. At least we've got a photo!

Question - did they "wire" the same part of the human brain to the rat brain? It seems like, if I understand this correctly, the command for "move tail" was triggered by looking at visual input, meaning they more or less routed the human visual cortex to the rat motor cortex. Or am I totally off the mark here?

Again, that's far too mechanistic for my tastes. Why and how may be the same for a certain set of natural phenomena, but when you enter the realm of human culture they diverge pretty drastically. Even if we accept that culture is a biological trait, thereby making it chemically – and ultimately mathematically –…

It's not in widespread use, no. I'm just saying that if we've already extended the "planets use Roman names" convention when designating newly discovered bodies like Neptune and Pluto, then it's reasonable to use the Latin names for other objects in the solar system.

We're going to check by staging naked shower fights, so don't try to pull any fast ones on us.

The first "quadrilogy" is rather interesting, though the subsequent books are tonally very, very different from "Ender's Game". As mentioned, "Ender's Shadow" is also rather good - Card basically gets to tell the same story as an older, better writer. I can't speak to the rest of the books, as I haven't read them.

First person to splice this with Mark Hamill's performance in Wing Commander wins a cookie.

100% with you on your first point about science. People who think scientific explanations take the wonder out of life drive me nuts.

Do you like your doctors to have useable equipment and user interfaces? Art did that.

So then what's wrong with "Terra", "Terran", and "Luna"? If we're following Roman/Latin convention to begin with and we're already using Sol as a proper noun for the sun, I'd say all those are fine choices.

Well yeah, but then we only have to worry about the exonym when we're speaking their language.