-
“I recently got a new digital meat thermometer. My plan was to slowly cook the steak until the internal temperature got to be about 140 degrees Fahrenheit with the oven at 200 degrees, take it out, wrap in tin foil, crank the oven to 500 degrees, stick it back in, and give it a nice exterior, reaching an internal temperature of about 150 degrees which would put it at about medium.
After I put the steak into the oven though, I started to watch the temperature go up on my digital thermometer and thought, why not take data. And so I did. Here are the results.”
-
“I would like to focus on the really great examples of teachers. They are out there. That is what lead me to a thought. How many great teachers are there? What percent of the math teachers do cool stuff? I am going to estimate this in a fermi-problem type fashion.”
-
“Call it the two-sigma blues. Two-sigma is mathematical jargon for a measurement or discovery of some kind that sticks up high enough above the random noise to be interesting but not high enough to really mean anything conclusive. For the record, the criterion for a genuine discovery is known as five-sigma, suggesting there is less than one chance in roughly 3 million that it is wrong. Two sigma, leaving a 2.5 percent chance of being wrong, is just high enough to jangle the nerves, however, and all of ours have been jangled enough. “