Some years ago I went on some sort of rant to the members of my household about “spitting image” and how it’s incorrect usage. The phrase is commonly used regarding a child that looks very much like one of its parents or another of its ancestors. I argued that “spitten image” is correct, because it’s … Read more
Here is a link to a fascinating post on this subject from earlier this year at Skulls in the Stars. The effect has apparently been observed for millennia (the post contains a reference by Aristotle!), but the conditions under which it occurs and the scientific explanation for the Mpemba effect are still unclear. Interested experimenters … Read more
Marion Brady wrote a wonderful piece for a Washington Post blog a couple of days ago, which I found out about thanks to Susan Ohanian’s very informative site. A very successful member of American society, with two master’s degrees, who is also a member of a school board, decided to take his state’s standardized tests … Read more
One of the persistent complaints about mathematics and science textbooks, especially high-school textbooks, is that the questions tend to involve formula manipulation in a way that is not very meaningful. Such questions tend to be artificial. A case in point is the following question, taken from a chapter on special relativity in a high-school physics … Read more
There is a review of the documentary movie American Teacher by Brian Jones, over at Susan Ohanian’s site. The review is here. Some representative quotes from the review: The American Teacher filmmakers show us a teacher in Texas, Erik Benner, who is doing his best to inspire his students, to bring history to life and … Read more
I recently finished reading Proofiness, written by Charles Seife, science writer and journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and it’s excellent. There are a number of glowing reviews out there (see Stephen Strogatz in the New York Times, John Allen Paulos in the Washington Post, Alexandra Witze in … Read more
Current grading policies at most schools are intended to measure learning, but they are counterproductive in that they actually inhibit learning. Taking a typical university mathematics course as an example, students might have a handful of assignments, a mid-term test, and a final exam. The number of graded items is small because universities are strapped … Read more
A few days ago I posted on a problem (Problem 4(a) on Page 7) from the very nice The USSR Olympiad Problem Book, by D.O. Shklarsky, N.N. Chentzov, and I.M. Yaglom: We are given 80 coins of the same denomination; we know that one of them is counterfeit and that it is lighter than the … Read more
Diane Ravitch reviews two new books on the current “crisis” in education in the New York Review of Books (hat tip to Susan Ohanian, who has a very interesting site devoted to education here; incidentally, Ms. Ohanian is married to physicist and fine textbook author Hans C. Ohanian). Her review is entitled School ‘Reform’: A … Read more
A review by Jim Powell of two recent books by Wendell Berry can be found here. A quoted fragment of one of his poems will give you a sense for Berry’s worldview: Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace. Health is not procured by sale of medication, or purity by the addition of poison. Science … Read more