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: In fact, there were… Continue reading Shameless Innumeracy
Author: Chad Orzel
Links for 2012-01-06
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 transformative. These often unsung researchers are willing to spend… Continue reading Links for 2012-01-06
On the Helpfulness of Numbers
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 calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this… Continue reading On the Helpfulness of Numbers
Links for 2012-01-05
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 minds will be changed. Still… Continue reading Links for 2012-01-05
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01
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… Continue reading Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01
Academic Poll: Day One
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-year students, so… Continue reading Academic Poll: Day One
2011: The Year in Blog
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, here… Continue reading 2011: The Year in Blog
Links for 2012-01-03
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 to address teacher shortages by sending graduates… Continue reading Links for 2012-01-03
The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
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 constraints that fully justify the scare quotes, at… Continue reading The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
It May or May Not be 2012 Somewhere
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… Continue reading It May or May Not be 2012 Somewhere