Math and the Teaching Thereof

Firday’s quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn’t have time for a more detailed response. Now that […]

links for 2009-06-30

Physics Buzz: A day at the International Submarine Races "Last weekend, travelers at a rest stop in Minnesota became alarmed when a group of college kids pulled up in a U-haul truck, carefully unloaded a large, sleek object from the back, and set to work on it with power tools. About the length of a […]

Total Proposal Security

The National Science Foundation uses a computerized proposal-and-report submission system called FastLane. When I first submitted a proposal, this required three things to log in: your last name, your Social Security number, and a password of your choice. Sometime in the last year, they stopped using the SSN, and switched to a randomly generated nine-digit […]

links for 2009-06-29

Cocktail Party Physics: dial-a-scientist "It all started Wednesday, when I got an email from Brandon Webb, who handles PR for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UT Dallas. He wanted to know if I could talk to a reporter who wanted to know whether a Styrofoam cup could break a windshield. (That’s an […]

links for 2009-06-27

Hacker News | I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this questi… "One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don’t mean understanding everything in the […]