Links for 2011-12-28

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.

I'm convinced that the Standards for Mathematical Practice are doomed to fail in most schools. Why? Because it seems that most teachers and principals don't understand a simple fact: to teach elementary school math well, you have to know elementary school math really well. And most people (be they teachers, principals or otherwise) simply don't understand much elementary school math. I don't know what teacher preparation programs are doing out there when it comes to math instruction, but from my experience in hiring teachers and my stint as an adjunct in one program, my guess is that if there is a math course in most of them it consists of something like, "Here's the Harcourt Brace textbook. Here's the Saxon textbook. Here's the Scott Foresman textbook. Here are some tricks for teaching long division."

Hypertext Transfer Protocol response status codes. And dogs.

With hundreds of popular-physics books published every year, finding the best is far from easy. Below, James Dacey, Matin Durrani and Margaret Harris reveal Physics World's choices for the 10 best books reviewed in the magazine in 2011

The Physics World staff try to predict the big physical science stories of the next year.