Catching Up To the Future: An Appreciation of William Gibson | Tor.com William Gibson is one of those writers whose name is in the process of becoming an adjective–consider Kafkaesque, Ballardian, Pynchonesque: words for which the meaning has become osmotically absorbed even by people who haven’t necessarily read the authors’ books. Now we have Gibsonesque… Continue reading Links for 2011-12-08
Month: December 2011
The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their… Continue reading The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Angular Momentum
Moving along through our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we come to the next important physical quantity, angular momentum. For some obscure reason, this gets the symbol L, and the angular momentum for a single particle about some point A is given by: This is probably the most deceptive equation we’ll see this season. Yesterday’s definition… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Angular Momentum
The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” — Mark Twain In last night’s post about a school board member failing 10th grade standardized tests, I may have unfairly slighted our students. In response to a comment in which Rick Roach, the school board member who couldn’t… Continue reading The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Working for a Living
Following the basic pattern established at the start of our seasonal countdown to Newton’s birthday, today’s equation defines a piece that was left hanging in yesterday’s post: This is the technical definition of “work” in physics terms. It’s also probably the scariest-looking equation to this point, as it explicitly involves vector calculus– there’s an integral… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Working for a Living
Links for 2011-12-07
You Khan’t Ignore How Students Learn | Action-Reaction People’s reactions are not indicators of effectiveness. Pre/post testing is needed to indicate effectiveness. Ah, but perhaps there is a relationship between people’s reaction and effectiveness? The research indicates otherwise. In the very research study that Khan says is valid (and then dismisses), student actually did better… Continue reading Links for 2011-12-07
Test Taking Takes Practice
A blog run by the Washington Post featured a post on Monday about an adult taking and failing a standardized test, who was later revealed as school board member Rick Roach: Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was… Continue reading Test Taking Takes Practice
The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover
It’s hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another “imminent death of publishing” article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There’s one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table… Continue reading The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Energy
For the sixth day of our advent countdown to Newton’s birthday, we have the first equation that really departs from the usual notation. I’ve gotten to kind of like the way the Matter and Interactions curriculum handles this, though, so we’ll use their notation: This is what Chabay and Sherwood refer to as the Energy… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Energy
Links for 2011-12-06
How Doctors Die « Zócalo Public Square It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths… Continue reading Links for 2011-12-06