Searching "comments":
| # | Comment | Survey |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | jonathan - what part of the calculus is the "basic" part that doesn't include diffeqs? | How much math do you use on a regular basis? |
| 12 | The comics are rarely first, but they're usually second. First depends on whether the headlines catch my eye or if one of my favorite daily sections is running (Three of which in the Boston Glob are "Food", "Health/Science", and "Home" - all sections you didn't list, btw). | What part of the newspaper do you read first? |
| 13 | I'm not *quite* old enough to remember how teenagers were acting thirty years ago, but ever since the early 70s I've been listening to people say "Kids are so badly behaved nowadays". I thought that rang false as a kid (If it *were* true, why were so many adults jerks?) and as an adult who has a fair amount of interaction with teenagers and very young college-age adults, it *still* rings false. Teens have always had rough edges, have always said "Um, er, whatever" a lot, have always argued with their parents and dressed funny. It's part of the whole becoming-one's-own-self thang. suplicant, your opinion about lowered intelligence has been widely and authoritatively disproved. Throughout the developed world (including the US) even as we continue to gripe about the state of education (as we should), intelligence tests show that the population as a whole is apparently growing smarter over the course of the last century. As to the number of kids involved in illegal and violent activities - the 50s were relatively calm, I'm sure, but cast your eyes back to the time between the world wars and you'll find that kids were heavily involved in the rackets, bootlegging, and gang activity of the major cities; and that the murder rate for youths (15 and younger) was almost five times as high as it is today. | Are teenagers today worse behaved than thirty or forty years ago? |
| 14 | spoken like a true suburbanite. | Are teenagers today worse behaved than thirty or forty years ago? |
| 15 | What about "start-up/invest in a company/non-profit to do x?" No, I meant "x" as in a variable - not a whole office building full of giggling professionals. Although... | What would you do if someone gave you $20,000,000,000? (Twenty Billion) |
| 16 | It would have to be a very small and boring island not to have enough on it to keep me occupied for a year - so forget the books, movies, et al - time to look at those after the year is up. I'd rather cast my senses out at the world around me during such a unique time than put a book in front of them. And I think I could go a year without outside human contact easily *IF* I knew that it would be just a year. "Time to ponder"? Wouldn't one have plenty of that, regardless? So - A sketch book (with writing implements, I presume), for writing, drawing, painting, folding, etc. Everything else in the way of artifacts I could probably build myself relatively easily, given a modicum of native materials. I guess with a supply of cellulose, I could make paper too, but I'd want to be able to record and plan from day 1. Great survey. | Which is most essential to you? |
| 17 | steve, "This is not a chat room"? That's just foolish. Of course it's a chat room - with surveys to set off the threads. You yourself spend plenty of time responding to comments with further coments - that's chatting. And with the exception of the ease-of-use argument (made, weirdly enough, by several of the SCers whose names I recognize as common commentors), all those that have pointed out supposed failings of essay-only questions have failed to note that *this* survey seems to suffer from none of them! It is neither too 'lite' nor deep, it's topical, it has been answered by a typical number of SCers, and it's collecting good useful data (and btw, a 'survey' has nothing to do with a *choice* of options, the word simply means the collecting of data for analysis through questions or observations). After all the slamming that Brain (often rightfully, imo) takes for playing popularity games, it would seem that there is a fair measure of hypocrisy here and that people are going out of their way to find fault with a consise, interesting, useful survey - perhaps because of who submitted it. Bad form. | Why do most SC users seem to hate essay questions? |
| 18 | Some of the people here are beginning to remind me very much of a gang of dogs who have picked out the young awkward one for abuse. Yuck. I agree with Brian insofar as the search engine, because it does not search the choices or exposition of a survey, often misses surveys which may be related to or include within them a topic one wishes to find. For example, Handle's recently created and highly rated survey - "Which is most essential to you?" fails to appear when searching for either "alone" "desert" "island" "important" etc etc. If the search engine searched the explanation paragraph or the choices, this wouldn't be the case. Without the code in front of me, I have no idea how much coding this requires - I suspect it is little. It *would* make the searches go slower, which some folks might not like, but the engine is pretty dang fast as it stands, and I would be willing to wait for a count of three (which is several times longer than it's taking right now) to get a more thorough search. Other people, including very often bill himself, have talked about improvements in SC. Brian brings up a possibility, and gets a new one torn - pretty obviously because many of you seem to have decided you don't like him personally. Bleh to *you*. | A New Search Engine |
| 19 | Yoiks! Don't refrigerate chocolate unless it's really hot out - the cold and dry makes it bloom (ie go all grey) and its texture degrades as well. Oranges supposedly don't like to be fridged, but they seem to last substantially longer that way - I usually keep a couple out on the counter because I like them better warm. If I have nuts/seeds which are fleshy and "naked" (ie pine nuts, opened peeled almonds), then I fridge them. How about coffee and tea? | Which of these things would you refrigerate? |
| 20 | chocolate-dipped waffle cones. But boy are they $$$! | Sugar or plain? An ice cream cone question. |
