Links for 2010-09-14

No. An exhaustive explanation of how we know the Earth goes around the Sun.

“Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he said. “Kids don’t get self-esteem by people just telling them they are wonderful.””

“[Dinesh] D’Souza’s understanding of anticolonialism in this article [in Forbes] isn’t even wrong. It reminds me of that rare (around here, at any rate) annoying undergraduate writer who produces unanimous amused disdain among professors of any ideological or pedagogical slant, the kind of student who simultaneously:

a) very obviously did none of the assigned reading;
b) makes shit up based on a garbled mixture of stuff they overheard drunk adults at their parents’ parties say, stuff that their junior high school sports coach/history teacher/fringe political activist used to say, and stuff they kind of remember seeing on Wikipedia somewhere;
c) adopts a rhetorical pose that is 50% bombast and 50% faux-erudition.

It’s the kind of stuff that barely qualifies the writer to be a forum troll, let alone published in a mass-circulation magazine.”

Similar questions arise concerning the God-references in A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design. Is it God as a literal creator? God as metaphor? God as euphemism for “the mystery at the root of the universe” (as Dawkins, in their interview, judged it to be with Hawking)?

There is another view: God-talk as marketing device. Hawking has always seemingly been aware of marketing, noting that he wanted A Brief History of Time sold in airport bookstores, cutting out equations from draft after draft in case they scared away readers, and choosing to publish with Bantam Books, who were well-positioned to bring the title to the mass market.

He subsequently wrote in an essay in Black Holes and Baby Universes that he considered, in the draft stage, of cutting the book’s final line about knowing the mind of God, but had he done so then sales might have halved.

“5. Do your problem sets. I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to practice your science. This is especially true in mathematics and physics. Problem sets are more than just ways to make sure you do your reading; they force your brain to apply what you’ve learned to new problems. This is–at a very fundamental level–what scientific research is all about. I will go so far as to say that you only learn something meaningfully when you’ve used it to generate new (at least to you) ideas, such as when you solve a hard homework problem. (In grad school this becomes: “… when you’ve used it to write an academic paper.”)
While we’re on the topic: do your problem sets with friends. You should always be able to write up a solution on your own, but it is good to discuss with others to learn how to generate solutions. Again: this is how real science is done, though collaboration and communication. “

“The following is an unfinished manuscript found under heaps of rubble and pizza boxes here at Virtuosi headquarters.  It appears to be some sort of screen play, though one would be hard-pressed to figure this out solely from the script.  The true giveaway was the 100 page addendum (not published) full of potential titles and acceptance speeches.  I dare not bore you with these vanity pages in their entirety, but just for completeness and posterity I include some samples.

For possible titles we have: “Dr. Dre, OR: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Metric,” “How to Teach Physics to your Dee Oh Double G (West Coast Edition),” “Bring Da Ruckus: ODEs by ODB” and “Flavor Flav’s Flavor Physics…boooyeeeee!” among other even worse and less relevant titles.”