Like everyone else I know, I am of course a longtime fan of the webcomic XKCD. But somehow it took me until last week to become aware of the frequently brilliant competitor Luke Surl, of which the above is a delectable example. What else out there am I missing?
Hat tip to Harry Brighouse of Crooked Timber.
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Caitlin Flanagan is such a smashingly good writer that I normally devour anything she’s written. But when I saw her latest piece in the Atlantic—roughly 5000 words in opposition to public school gardens, where students learn horticulture instead of long division—it seemed well, too petty a subject for Flanagan’s vast talents—so I put it aside without reading it.
Today I read it. Wow, was I wrong. This is Caitlin Flanagan at her blistering best. I’ll offer you a few choice quotes, but my real recommendation is to leave now and go read the entire piece.
With the Edible Schoolyard..the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time…has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and the another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outercourse” and in another it’s abstinence-only education.
Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it?…If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: A way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.
Until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise we become complicit—through our best intentions—in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, undereducated underclass, but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its state.
There’s much more where that came from. Why are you still here?
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Is mathematics invented or discovered? In my experience, applied scientists often think of mathematics as a human invention, while actual mathematicians (with a few notable exceptions) feel sure that mathematics was always there to be discovered. (Of course, it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of this is genuine disagreement and how much is a language barrier.)
I’ve just finished reading an excellent book by Mario Livio which is entirely about the invention/discovery question, though he’s chosen the (somewhat unfortunate) title Is God a Mathematician? Much of the book is a lively romp through mathematical history, with a well chosen mix of biography and exposition. Although he parts company with them in the last chapter, Livio gives a more than fair hearing to the many great mathematicians who have insisted that they are discoverers, from Pythagoras through Galileo, G.H. Hardy, Kurt Godel, and the contemporary Fields Medalist Alain Connes (among others). Here, for example is Connes:
Continue reading ‘Jellyfish Math’
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You know that metal plate in your bathtub? The one with the little lever on it that opens and closes the drain? What happens when the water level rises above that plate?
When my sister asked me this question over Thanksgiving dinner, I answered, with the utmost confidence, that it causes (quite instantaneously) an enormous flood. (Note the exact wording. This will be important later.) My sister nodded sagely and said “That’s what I thought, too.” My sister and I had the same mother, you see.
And then she asked, quite innocently, “So. How exactly does that work?”. And I was stunned—absolutely stunned—to realize not only that I had no answer to this question, but that there could not plausibly be an answer. Which somehow had never occurred to me in the half century or so that I’d been harboring this ridiculous notion.
Continue reading ‘Unbelievable’
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Some gift ideas for the more unusual people on your Christmas list:
First, with a hat tip to my sister, three from Amazon.com.
And speaking of Amazon customer reviews, I was more than pleased to stumble on this quote in a review of The Big Questions:
Also, if you are a parent and are blessed with a math/science inclined child, please, please, please buy them a copy!
It’s not too late!
Finally, as a Christmas gift to my readers—or at least to that vocal subset of my readers who have been clamoring for answers to the honors questions I posted a couple of weeks ago: Your wish is my command.
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If you were choosing 18 economists to highlight in a calendar, who would they be?
The American Economics Association has chosen, among others, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Smith and Joan Robinson. (Can you identify the rest?) I haven’t yet held the Economists Calendar in my hands, but the reliable Mark Skousen has, and his verdict (via private email) is “Bravo!”
The calendar includes, according to Skousen, “an amazingly complete listing of top economists through the ages”, along with the featured 18. There’s still time to order before Christmas.
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