School Popularity and Success: How Are They Correlated?
Recent discussion about school popularity and success, the correlation between the two, and where it will likely lead students in their future lives has been a topic of discussion lately thanks to a new report issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The study, which you can find here, goes on to point out that those who were among the most popular students in high school often go on to earn up to 10 percent more than their peers over the next forty years.
This really discredits the idea that the nerds will inherit the earth, doesn’t it?
It’s something that, in a way, makes sense, but I feel like it’s worthy of further discussion nonetheless.
So keep reading to learn more about school popularity and success, what it potentially means, and what advice one might be able to take from all of this, regardless of age.
The Effects of Advertising on Children: What is the Responsibility?
Have you ever given much thought to the effects of advertising on children?
It’s an issue that warrants serious discussion for a number of reasons, the least of which is how advertising can influence the buying habits of children right now as well as when they become adults.
But is advertising to children beneficial or harmful? Should more be done in order to regulate it and make sure it falls within certain guidelines?
These are questions we’ll explore in this post, so keep reading to learn more about the effects of advertising on children and what it all could potentially mean.
If you “forgive, but never forget” – can you ever truly move on?
If you “forgive, but never forget” – can you ever truly move on?
By Catherine
We have all heard the saying, “Forgive, but never forget.” I know I heard the mantra numerous times from my mother after a boyfriend (or two) broke my little, high school heart. I suppose this was meant to be a compromise between taking the higher road and always remembering so we can learn from past mistakes. Ultimately, we are to be better people for it. However, a twisted paradox ends up forming that leaves ourselves and our relationships changed forever. Past wrongdoings will always be tucked away in the back of your mind.
Now, I am not saying it is impossible to do so. But, forgiveness is a tough thing. Can any of us truly say we have forgiven everyone who hurt us 100%? Some people are very easy to forgive – like a sister or brother who takes your clothes without asking. For others, we have to find the strength to forgive for the most unthinkable transgressions – like the infidelity of a partner or spouse.
And even if you do decide to forgive your loved one, would it really be possible to put the past out of your mind and move on with the relationship? Could the relationship ever be made whole and safe again?
Sure, you can make replacement piers and towers out of all the “I’m sorry” and “I will make this up to you” apologies to keep the cables aloft. But, the anchors, the most important parts of any bridge – trust and honesty – are forever shattered.
For me, this is one bridge that can never be completely mended.
I can forgive the person who hurt me. Being angry at him or her will only foster hatred and wasted energy.
I just pray for them…
I haven’t been to church since I don’t remember when
Things were going great ’til they fell apart again
So I listened to the preacher as he told me what to do
He said you can’t go hating others who have done wrong to you.
Sometimes we get angry, but we must not condemn.
Let the good Lord do His job and you just pray for them.
I pray your brakes go out running down a hill
I pray a flowerpot falls from a window sill and knocks you in the head like I’d like to
I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
I pray you’re flying high when your engine stalls
I pray all your dreams never come true
Just know wherever you are honey, I pray for you
I’m really glad I found my way to church
‘Cause I’m already feeling better and I thank God for the words.
Yeah I’m going take the high road,
And do what the preacher told me to do,
You keep messing up and I’ll keep praying for you.
I pray your tire blows out at 110.
I pray you pass out drunk with your best friend and wake up with his and her tattoos.
I pray your brakes go out running down a hill.
I pray a flowerpot falls from a window sill and knocks you in the head like I’d like to.
I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
I pray you’re flying high when your engine stalls
I pray all your dreams never come true
Just know wherever you are, near or far, in your house or in your car,
wherever you are honey, I pray for you.
I pray for you
“I Pray For You” – Jaron and The Long Road to Love
The Case For Interplanetary Mining
(A logical examination of the steps to long term survival, expansion and universal awareness of a given species. Copied from msword, expect alignment issues.)
This artical assumes two things:
- Other planets have in “some form”, a table of elements, we could selectivly mine from and that under the proven theory of spontanious life, other garden worlds would too exist with corelating minerals.
- The causes of periodic destruction or global dissruptions are natural, like increased solor activity and not little green men interfering with us.
So, we want to become an interplanetary dwelling species. What does that mean? What would it take? When could this happen, 20 minutes or 10,000 years? Can it realistically be done?
These are questions I attempt to address in this paper.
Let’s start with definition; What is an interplanetary dwelling species? In terms of long term survivability, it means being able to avoid natural and inevitable planetary catastrophes. Global changes like food pyramids toppling, impacts, solar changes, disease, volcanic activity –> insert doomsday mechanism of choice <- would be avoided by moving large masses of its population to new or existing alternate locations as individual system stability changed favorably. (See Dr. Michio Kaku on NASA’s findings in regard to the solar activity spike of 2012, and how large enough spikes in solar activity could be a global hazard to ALL LIFE.)
Even being able to move a substantial portion of the population to thrive elsewhere would keep the species alive and possibly provide them with data to more accurately predict specific global changes in the future. Much like we slowly drew up a knowledge base of planetary weather to predict many unfavorable conditions, we would slowly draw up a much larger weather map, a galactic weather map to predict favorable or unfavorable future conditions within individual star systems.
With this idea in mind, imagine another world, when we know that earth with have a one year solar radiation bath at deadly levels in 2012. Having know this event would occur precisely at “x” moment for roughly 100 years, we have already prepared the population for relocation via temporary starship transport and living quarters.
Imagine we mined up a new exotic mineral allowing us to make cheap solar shielding that also acted as a solar conductor stopping the deadly radiation while making it into something useful. Imagine the possibilities.
This cycle of global change occurs naturally and periodically. While I do not believe there is a consensus of timeframe, there are several theories.
The time frame on which this periodic change occurs is only directly relevant in that civilizations arising to apex while natural oil is high volume and gets discovered will have from then until the next major global change generally in which to make the leap to interplanetary operations, that being the only critical relevance to this case, the time frame of global changes affecting the rise or fall of civilizations will not be addressed in this paper.
I think if a civilization became advanced to where ours is today, the step to intergalactic travel is right now, if not a little late. As the paper continues, it will become clear how important oil production is to industries that build the first stages of an interplanetary mining network and how that leads to stepping up from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization. If oil production stops or becomes too sparse before this leap is made, it very likely will not happen.
“A species must be able to take a given planetary amount of x=fuel resource (we don’t know all civilizations would use oil or that their planet would even make oil.), time experimenting, global resource management and with those key steps, launch mining operations onto other planetary bodies, before their own planetary fuel resources ran out, to even begin long term species sustainability.” – Necessary and unavoidable steps to advance from a Type 0 to Type 1 civilization.
The minerals extracted on other worlds, (Preferably dead worlds however that is likely a moral debate involving factors we cannot yet be aware of.) are the lifeblood of the interplanetary species. If resources are wasted or remain unfound within a planetary body, a given civilization will not make the leap required in time, to avoid an inevitable planetary catastrophe, and most likely will largely die out. Chance A: If the resources remain unfound, a future civilization could have another chance to make this leap. Chance B: If the resource is wasted, the chance could be gone forever. (With the exception of outside intervention.) Is our planet one of those? We don’t know.
The possibilities; a yet unfound element with favorable fuel properties, an element mined away so extensively long ago we see no trace of it, an element the earth simply does not naturally make, an oversight in the nature of a known element, mining minerals on another planet is for the devil and shouldn’t be done or it simply is not possible. (Resource x)? It is very possible our table of elements is not complete. Other planets and process may have combined in different ways to create elements we are not aware of, elements with very favorable fuel properties. But for now, we work with what the earth gave us, oil.
Theoretically, Option #1, another interplanetary civilization who choose the less moral path of interplanetary mining could have found resource x before our time and marked us as a low travel zone so we wouldn’t find much about life in the universe before natural cycles of planetary changes wiped us out.
Option #2, a previous civilization (If you’ve ever read about “Out of place artifacts or OOPAR”) mined this resource to exhaustion before it got a firm interplanetary grip.
How likely are these two scenarios?
Well, Option #1, we have no idea. We don’t know if there really even are other civilizations out there, so we can’t really calculate those odds. While I realize that isn’t really answer, I must insist; Sometimes “I don’t know.” is indeed an acceptable answer. Not knowing something is only proof that there are things that you do not know. It proves nothing more and nothing less, and while we may not like it, must be a temporarily acceptable answer sometimes.
Option #2,When you consider “OOPAR” you must admit while small, there is some chance an advanced civilization arose here on earth before what we see today. Taking into account odd and end artifacts that represent knowledge we feel various civilizations of the time should not have known, structures they built we cannot replicate even today. This clearly becomes a theoretical possibility as well.
However the odds are still in our favor. Some mysterious “Resource X” may not be needed after all, oil could be that resource. Commonly accepted as the broken down remains of previous organic life, fossilized plant matter etc. Oil would naturally replenish itself after a great deal of time as organic life forms grow and die over vast amounts of time, meaning this could also be a common mineral on garden worlds.
Theoretically, I suppose among the variety of possible garden worlds, there could be garden / oil producing worlds inhabited by all varieties of non sentient life or worlds longer organically active (Dead worlds).
As for earths oil, we have a conundrum, we are almost out of it and we have not launched any kind of mining operations outside of our own planet for mineral resources. If oil is the fuel we need to get payloads out of the atmosphere, we must focus enough of what’s left to explore other worldly mining.
If we don’t, we then fall into the “Chance B” category; A civilization that used up their planetary fuel before expanding mining to other planetary bodies.
While oil might not be about to stop pumping tomorrow, it will soon enough. Without it we do not have a means to launch materials in or out of a planets orbit, making interplanetary mining highly improbable at that point due to exhausted fuel resources. (This does not mean there is not another way, we simply do not yet know of another way to put payloads in space.)
*fig 1
| An Elementary Table | 1 | 2 | |
| Chance / Option | Used Wisely / Not Yet Found | Wasted / Taken before Man’s time. | |
| A | Oil is interplanetary fuel | Interplanetary mining achieved. Chance to sustain species greatly improved. | Interplanetary mining not achieved. Chance to sustain species very low. |
| B | Interplanetary fuel is not oil | If not yet found, funds should be allocated to identify this property and uncover it. This is however very unlikely and bad news if true. As oil diminishes mining grinds to a halt. | Not much we can do about that, file a complaint? However this is also very unlikely. Some kind of trace of such an elemental fuel would have likely been found. |
Here (*fig 1) we have an elementary table, displaying the possible precursors and outcomes. We have 2 realities here, Row A, and Row B. Each represents an existence where oil “IS” or “IS NOT” the best interplanetary fuel earth has to offer. Column 1 and 2, represent another chance, or option. Row A, Column 1 gives us our best shot under current knowledge and tech to achieve interplanetary mining. The case for starting mining operations on other worlds gets very strong at this point. Using oil resources in a mankind-wide goal of achieving interplanetary mining must be the first step in habiting other worlds. The resources to occupy multiple planets cannot and will not come from Earth alone.
At this point some of you may have observed, “Oil is not exactly the fuel we burn for space flight.” and you are right. However, oil is the fuel used to drive all of the industries that make space flight possible. It manufactures the machines, that are used to make the high tech machines used to build the space ships to safety specs. Oil is used in some small way in almost everything we use, build, eat, move, design. Without it, the process of interplanetary mining becomes an even more monumental task, lower the chances of the species surviving long term. So with the remaining oil reserves we have, globally as a species, should we dawdle it away on petty territory or religious wars? Sounds like something we would do with our last days doesn’t it? “Screw it, we’re out of fuel and we’re all gonna die, lets slaughter each other for what’s remains until no one is left.”
Mining on other planetary bodies is the only way to provide the physical mineral resources needed like steel, copper, iron, diamond, quartz and even fuels like oil or natural gas to build an interplanetary network with industrial transport ships, personal travel vessels, commercial travel. The raw materials required can only be procured through interplanetary mining for minerals. This also brings a high probability of finding new exotic elements to build with or use as efficient fuels, super conductors, who knows what else it could lead to discovering. Archeological remains, fossils, evidence of past life on a given planet? A more accurate understanding of the history of the planets in our system and others for certain, as well as valuable mineral resources that would be used to physically build the multi-planet network.
Perhaps we find history and perhaps not but to think of the world as anything but a flat disc was once such a silly notion that main stream scientists of the time would have laughed you out of a room for thinking about it any other way. As it turned out, the world was round and there very well could be some kind of life architecture past or present on almost any given planet. Accounting for impacts, planetary collisions, intruder bodies, colliding systems and all the other strange universal phenomenon, any given planet, in any given system could harbor some fashion of remnant from previous life architecture be they fossil or construct in nature. Learning to find and identify these remains is a challenge. But honestly very little about the world around us has been proven, nothing is yet impossible. Much of modern science is based on standing theory, not proven fact. Not that they aren’t very good theories, they are fascinating possibilities, but they are not facts until rigorously proven beyond doubt. Most have not been, and many have standing contradictory theories or even directly challenging evidence.
The crucial step of interplanetary mining provides the necessary building material to support population expansion, stable planetary safety measures, and interplanetary industrial / civilian travel networks in prolonged species existence. This ideal could seem for many civilizations like it does for ours here on earth. “A distant future dream, not a reality I’ll see in my lifetime.” and with that “it’s in the future only” mentality, they globally mismanagement resources on things like “My god is stronger than your god!” wars and wasteful “I own 13 homes over 13 million dollars!” lifestyles. This chance at real species wide sustainability passes them by while they burn through the remaining resources completely unaware of the (possibly one time) chance to break out of the “Single planetary dwelling cycle” that they just missed.
In closing, I would like to assert that I am no expert on the related material. I am however well read over my twenty-eight years. Space in general has been a lifelong passion of mine, and while I don’t know much in the way of mathematical physics I would like to believe I have a firm grasp on a wide variety of space related fields. The case in question however is not a case born of academic field study, it is a case born of simple logic. I do not believe one can really be granted a degree for logic. You either get it or you don’t. If Humans want to live as a self sustained, long term species, we have to make a choice; Go outside our home planet for resources OR blindly have “faith” earth will just magically always have enough for us.
To me it seems a clear resounding choice. Live or Die. Use the resources we have mining yet more, or burn through earths mineral reserves and re-deliver us unto a new stone-age every time the earth undergoes dramatic changes. We must start probing other planets for minerals and developing advanced yet reasonable ways to mine outside of our homeworld.
Separation To Solve Marriage Problems
I’m going to be up front and say that separation is NOT a good way to solve marriage problems.
Some people say “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” — I don’t agree with this. From my experience, all separation does is give you time to think.. and thinking isn’t always the best thing.
If you can think positively and justify or deal with the negatives, then maybe .. but MOST people can’t do this.. as a matter of fact, very FEW people can do this..
So my friends will ask me: “Can separation help a marriage?” – and I tell them: “No.”
On the other hand, I am open minded, and can see where one would think this is good advice: “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.. and separation simulates that.”
For advice on marriage problems like this – I tend to lean towards more practical viewpoints.. that is: separation will make you realize what you had, but it will also create distance.. especially if both parties don’t come to an understanding at the same time.
Say the husband decides that he can’t live without the wife.. but the wife is just starting to appreciate her new found space. If the husband goes back to the wife at that time, it could trigger an argument that pushes the couple further apart than they already are!
Watch out for the following marriage problem signs:
- Limited to no sex
- Arguing over small details
- Spouse not wearing ring
These are the top 3 signs that there are problems in your marriage. In todays day and age, couples are way too quick to see a marriage counselor or try a separation. From my experienced past, I would highly recommend open communication before all other measures.
The hard part is to keep an open mind and put yourself in your spouses shoes. If you’re both able to do that.. there will be some resolve.
But if think your situation is beyond fixing “in-house” – look to Mort Fertels Marriage Max program to save your broken marriage.
His program is very cost effective and was rated #1 marriage counseling program in 2009.
Just do yourself a favor and don’t do a separation to solve your marriage problems.. you’re only going to create more.. trust me!