January 14, 2012
It's a sign of how good computers have gotten that I'm faintly offended whenever Google Translate fails to come up with something even halfway sensible. I mean, translating a blog post from one language to another is a ridiculously difficult problem, and yet they usually do a passable job. It's…
January 13, 2012
I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time…
January 13, 2012
In Praise of Footnotes (Polar Bear Cub/Anything But The Republicans Dept.) « The Inverse Square Blog
Exit, pursued by a [actual, live, polar] bear.
OCD, Vampires, and Rants, oh my! - Men's Versus Women's Poses
As mentioned yesterday, I took some inspiration from Jim C Hines's Striking A Pose…
January 11, 2012
Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture:
The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies…
January 11, 2012
I'm running a little short on blogging inspiration lately. This is partly just a function of being busy-- most of my time is spent frantically working on class prep or child maintenance, and another piece is the result of an inconvenient policy change. But I do feel like I've gotten into a bit of a…
January 11, 2012
Confessions of a Community College Dean: What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads?
The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts. What if colleges ran attack ads?
How Many Stephen Colberts Are There…
January 10, 2012
My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general "research methods" class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there's a lot more specialization by subfield),…
January 10, 2012
The Active Class » Blog Archive » Do they do the reading? Helping students prepa...
It's a common complaint: Students don't read the book before class. It's probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences. Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous…
January 9, 2012
In comments to Friday's snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing…
January 8, 2012
Lots of people ask how SteelyKid is taking to having a younger sibling. Well, judge for yourself:
This is during the Giants-Falcons playoff game this afternoon, but it's pretty typical. When both SteelyKid and The Pip are home, she's always running over to give him kisses and hugs and chatter at…
January 6, 2012
On last month's post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes:…
January 6, 2012
Frontier experiments: Tough science : Nature News & Comment
As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging -- and just as potentially…
January 5, 2012
Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the…
January 5, 2012
The Messenger - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Politics - The Atlantic
I've thought a lot about Farrakhan, recently, watching Ron Paul's backers twist themselves in knots to defend what they have now euphemistically label as "baggage." I don't think it makes much sense to try to rebut the charges here. No…
January 4, 2012
As mentioned a few times previously, the class I'm teaching this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I'm doing to the blog.
Today was the first…
January 4, 2012
It's the first day of class today (for me, anyway-- classes technically started yesterday, but I don't teach on Tuesdays this term). This, of course, means that something will go horribly wrong. The question is, what?
What will go wrong on the first day of class today?
This is a class for first-…
January 3, 2012
I'm a little late to the Most Popular Posts of the Year list party, partly because I wanted to wait until the year was actually over, and partly because Google Analytics was being Difficult, and I had to switch back to the "old" version to get actual numbers out. Having sorted that out, though,…
January 3, 2012
Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Magazine
For "Science" read "Medical Science" throughout, but other than that, it's a good discussion of the problem of biological complexity.
Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence | National Education Policy Center
Teach For America (TFA) aims…
January 2, 2012
My class this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" with the title "A Brief History of Timekeeping," looking at the science and technology of timekeeping from prehistory through modern atomic clocks. This is nominally an introduction to "research methods," though the class operates under a lot of…
December 31, 2011
A while back, a reader from Bulgaria sent me a photo of a highly topical bottle of local spirits:
You can either know where you are, or how much you've drunk, but not both...
Having spent my last day of 2011 taking SteelyKid to the mall for bouncy-bounce and midway games, and then having her help…
December 31, 2011
Determining the ultimate champion from the year that was - Grantland
It wasn't until I attempted to fill a draw of 64, and got stuck at 7, did I realize what a huge year this was for losers. If you weren't getting financially screwed over, you were probably getting divorced, locked up, or pepper…
December 30, 2011
I will eventually do a "Year in Blog" post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I'm too busy prepping next term's class to do all the link chasing.
That doesn't mean I can't engage in a little self-promotion, though. After all, my…
December 29, 2011
Tests Cast Doubt on F.A.A. Restrictions on Kindle and iPad - NYTimes.com
The Federal Aviation Administration has its reasons for preventing passengers from reading from their Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. But they just don't add up. Since I wrote a column last month asking why…
December 28, 2011
Armageddon Rock by Alan Smale | Lightspeed Magazine
The Doomsday Asteroid is coming. An immense boulder with our name on it is cruising through the Solar System, and we all know what will happen when it arrives.
Innumeracy on the Faculty! | Blog
I'm convinced that the Standards for Mathematical…
December 27, 2011
One of The Pip's Christmas presents simply demands to be shown off here:
This is a baby blanket knitted by his awesome Aunt Anastasia, with three physics equations on it. They're subtle, but if you look closely, you can read them: E=mc2, V=IR, and F=ma.
All the other babies will be jealous of his…
December 24, 2011
As we started the last week of the advent calendar, I was trying to map out the final days, and was coming up one equation short. I was running through various possibilities-- the Dirac equation, Feynman's path integrals, the Standard Model Lagrangian, when I realized that the answer was staring me…
December 23, 2011
A week and a half ago, when the advent calendar reached Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, I said that it was the first equation we had seen that wasn't completely correct. Having done our quick swing through quantum physics, the time has come to correct that equation:
If you say "Einstein…
December 22, 2011
Newton's birthday (in the Julian calendar) is Sunday, so we're in the final days of the advent calendar. Which means it's time for the equations that are least like anything Newton did, such as today's:
This is the Schrödinger equation from non-relativistic quantum mechanics. If you want to…
December 22, 2011
Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass Ä°Ëâ¬" Whatever
But -- but -- what about all those horrible atheists taking over holiday displays with crucified Santa skeletons? Surely that's evidence of a war! Well, no, it's evidence of some non-believers taking a page out of the PETA playbook, i.e.,…
December 21, 2011
Today's equation in our march to Newton's birthday is actually a tiny bit out of order, historically speaking:
This is the Rydberg formula for the wavelengths of the spectral lines in hydrogen (and hydrogen-like ions), with R a constant having the appropriate units, and the two n's being two…
