Yesterday, one of the elder Free-Ride offspring's teammates brought a Rubik's Cube to soccer practice. While this youngster fiddled with the cube during a water break, I mentioned that I knew how to solve it. I was asked to transmit...
Read on »
Posted on October 6, 2007 12:29 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Chad and Rob have already noted this piece of news about soon-to-be-published research indicating that the order in which high school students are taught physics, chemistry, and biology makes very little difference to their performance in science classes at the...
Read on »
Posted on July 27, 2007 6:23 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The elder Free-Ride offspring has lately gotten into playing "poison", a nim-type game for two players. You start with a pile of twelve items that are the same and one item that is different (the poison). Each turn, players can...
Read on »
Posted on December 29, 2006 12:05 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some readers have called to my attention a pair of recent stories from the New York Times that you may find interesting. First, Audrey noted another dispatch on the eternal struggle over how math ought to be taught:...
Read on »
Posted on November 22, 2006 4:17 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've always liked soccer balls -- and not just because you can play soccer with them. The arrangement of pentagons and hexagons to form a surfaces that's reasonable spherical always seemed outstandingly clever. Who was the genius who first realized...
Posted on June 21, 2006 2:59 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks