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Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

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Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#91
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like a figurative kick in the face to those who argue against free education and social programmes "because the market will solve it and those that work hard enough will make it, so it's fair". The world is deeply unjust economically and the vast majority loses from that, and those, that manage the inquality by using the cheap larbor and forced constraints of the disadvantaged to serve the more fortunate o…

> there should be a big consensus for universal conditionless free education, social security and health insurance backed by the government. You allude to the best argument for these things, something like: "people are born into the world with a set of advantages and disadvantages they neither earned nor deserve, so we should do our best to even the playing field". But you missed the mark in terms of identifying the…

> Which would you rather have? A wealthy society with inequality or a poor society without inequality?

This is a good as in goodwill and honest point here. However, I think it isn't a dichotomy based on evidence. For example, most of northern Europe has these programmes and they are not poor, and there exist many poor countries without these programmes. If I thought these programmes would leave the people less wealthy, healthy, happy, I would be against them.

If the programmes create negative incentives in people as to not be productive and successful to a degree that offsets the advantages in reduced crime, more tax because of higher educated people and thus salary and countless other and not easily measured advantages like progress on science, culture, and art, then I would be against those programmes. This is however not what we are seeing. It is a scary shadow on the wall while we can see the cute bunny in the foreground with our eyes directly.

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#92

> At present, no screening or filtering for microplastics takes place in any European wastewater treatment centres. This seems to be a hole that needs plugging. Regulations that prohibit the use of this stuff altogether would be even better.

This stuck out as strange to me since they defined microplastics as <5mm. If you run water through sand it would filter things this large, and that's a common wastewater treatment practice.

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#93
post #34

"Ferrier sat his Leaving Certificate exams last month at Schull Community College and is due to attend university in the Netherlands. The teenager works as a curator at the Schull Planetarium, has won 12 science fair awards, speaks three languages fluently, plays the trumpet at orchestra level, and had a minor planet named after him by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory." Anyone else feeling somewhat inadequate in comparison…

> had a minor planet named after him by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. I could somewhat deal with the rest with a shoulder shrug, but this one is what makes it too hard to swallow :)

https://www.fionnferreira.com/2019/04/a-minor-planet-was-nai...

He got that for winning the Google science award in the article.

https://www.googlesciencefair.com/projects/2018/2c3f6207b15f...

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is correct only in the sense that that is the purpose of many manufactured microplastics, and the teenager's quote hints at it: "The method used was most effective on fibres obtained from a washing machine and least effective on polypropylene plastics". I strongly think it's the majority, though I don't have a source, that most microplastics come from wear and other sources. From consumer sources, micropl…

According to this [1] source, only about 2% of microplastics are due to cosmetics. The majority are from synthetic textiles (35%) and tyres (28%). [1] https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documen...

I felt good about buying cotton tees which need less laundry due to hydrophobic and silver ion coatings. But they contain a bit of lycra. And they are hard to recycle. What should I buy instead?

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#95
post #33

Maybe it was the cynical in me, but I wonder why those "teenager will save the world" relates are so popular (but often show so few results at long term). Some awards seem just a way to pose, borrow some good ideas, obtain a photo and a cover page and this is all. Will be interesting to see how this ends

Granted this was many years back now, but when I was familiar with the Westinghouse Award world there was invariably an adult scientist somewhere in the background pushing a research agenda.

Go to any R1 university and talk to the postdocs, they are the same teenagers with ten to fifteen more years of knowledge under their belts.

That's not to say there is no such thing as prodigy, but they tend to be in a few fields where it is possible to substitute sheer raw brilliance for knowledge of the literature (e.g. certain subfields of math) and they are extremely rare.

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#96
post #66
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like he has parents from different countries, first name is Irish, surname sounds Portuguese(?) so head start there on the language front, perhaps. Schull is a very small community, couple of thousand max but there's been a lot of 'alternative' type immigration there from other first world countries, artists etc from places like England (eg Jeremy irons), Netherlands so its secondary school is pretty progressi…

This reads like a figurative kick in the face to those who argue against free education and social programmes "because the market will solve it and those that work hard enough will make it, so it's fair". The world is deeply unjust economically and the vast majority loses from that, and those, that manage the inquality by using the cheap larbor and forced constraints of the disadvantaged to serve the more fortunate o…

Agreeing with you...

""but the government is incompetent/corrupt/inefficient""

There's always some kind of overhead. Open markets and open societies require infrastruture.

Rules, government, lawyers, accountants, judges, cops and so forth are cheaper (for society) than anarchy (laissez faire).

I'd take the Freedom Markets™ advocates a bit more seriously if they offered any kind of alternative. Something a bit more constructive than "taxes are theft!".

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenagers also tend to have all the time in the world for hobbies, relative to working adults. I'm a firm believer that in order to reach virtuous levels in anything, you really need to take advantage of your teenage years to nail down the fundamentals. I'm a musician myself, and spent almost every day between ages 13 to 20, often up to 6 hours a day, practicing and playing my instrument. Way more often than not, whe…

I disagree. Your teenage years are just your first opportunity to "master" a skill. If we take the 10000 hour rule as an example it takes 5 years of continuous effort. Between the age of 12 and 18 there is plenty of time for that. After that you go to higher which lets you master your second skill. After that you go to work and master your third skill and so on. The only difference is that during your teenage years y…

> If we take the 10000 hour rule as an example it takes 5 years of continuous effort.

While your point about about teenagers having lots of discretionary time to become better at what they choose to pursue is very valid, the 10,000 hour rule is a distortion of the findings of a study on accomplished violinists. It is not broadly applicable. The tradition of violin playing has hundreds of years of teaching and quantifiable and measurable performance indicators. Other fields, not so much.

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#99
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in reality the teenager's mental output isn't higher than a random adult engineer. But people just think "amazing" when a teenager does something, because people now have very low expectation for teenagers.

The question then is why aren't more adult engineers in those awards (shrug). Maybe they know better and assure to patent their product/idea/project first to exchange it for a pat in the shoulder and a little gossip exposure to show your mum. Dunno... For this guy the effort investment will be very profitable at least. I'm honestly happy for him (but a litte baffled that they still look for multitask superheros able…

> they still look for multitask superheros able to play the tuba

I don't think the prize takes his tuba skills into account at all. It's just that very driven people take to be driven in their various interests.

That said, one reason to prefer tuba-playing ocean cleaners might be to avoid those that will burnout before reaching the goals.

Re: Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water

#100
post #90
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world is deeply unjust economically.......and I feel stupidified when I see how these programmes aren't yet serious international standards. It's not really that simple. Taking, by force, from Person A to raise Person B's children is complicated especially if you're worried about justness.

Person's A child won't be held back tangibly if instead of a living on a 100+ million family fortune, that instead it's a fraction of that due to equalization of education efforts. Man cannot be born as equals when one child could buy their entire university, while another cannot even afford basic living.

And what happens to society as a whole when we abandon a person's right to own the products of their labor? What happens when highly productive people decide they have better things to do than go to work and get taxed at 70%?

A lot of people like a carbon tax because it will lower carbon emissions, if you tax productivity it has the same effect. A lot of people like clean energy subsidies because it makes clean energy more common, unfortunately subsidizing poverty often has the same effect.

I'm not saying you're wrong to care, I'm saying it's not a simple problem.

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