It’s cited as one of 366 Weird Movies. “Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational?”–W.D. Richter, explaining why there is a watermelon inside the Banzai Institute … Any movie that successfully incorporates […]
Luboš Motl takes off on Nautilus’ disillusioned ex-physicist. “Bob Henderson wrote an autobiography for Nautil.Us” and that provided the ammunition for a rant on Life’s Journey that any college freshman with ambition should read carefully. This is a sketch of the “path towards the deep laws of the Universe” that I already had in mind […]
Keep in mind that it is the craftsman and not the tools that solve problems and create solutions and that tools are the product of craftsman, too. Tools not only enable and facilitate, they also communicate. They are one craftsman sharing ideas with another. How you can do something influences how you think about doing […]
Anthony Watts reports: NOAA/NWS to stop ‘yelling’ at the public in their forecasts. New forecast software is allowing the agency to break out of the days when weather reports were sent by “the wire” over teleprinters, which were basically typewriters hooked up to telephone lines. Teleprinters only allowed the use of upper-case letters, and while […]
The announcement indicates that gravity waves have been detected. The source of the waves is the collision of two black holes each with a mass of tens of times that of the sun. In the collision, an amount of mass was lost equivalent to several times that of the sun. This loss of mass was […]
It was a link to the capacitor codes page that got me started on the TransWiki. A look at the sealed lead acid page indicated that the technical expertise was up there, too. There’s a good range of information on the Wili from paint primers and solvents to KiCad information. The company sells industrial level […]
Andy Kiersz presents The 17 equations that changed the course of history at Business Insider In 2013, mathematician and science author Ian Stewart published a book on 17 Equations That Changed The World. We recently came across this convenient table on Dr. Paul Coxon’s twitter account by mathematics tutor and blogger Larry Phillips that summarizes […]
In a discussion between Dave Jones and Jack Ganssle (YouTube) the topic of engineering education came up. This centered on the requirements for calculus despite neither of these experienced electronics engineers recalling having ever used integrals or differentials in their careers. The issue is one of training versus education. Engineering curriculum in colleges is particularly […]
It looks like the Kickstarter project for a $9 computer is getting a lot of publicity and a lot of subscribers.(See C.H.I.P. Is a Tiny, Incredibly Powerful Mini $9 PC That Runs Linux at Softpedia). The plan is to take a System on a Chip (SoC) designed for cheap tablets and put it out in […]
I always considered mathematics education to be much like calesthenics in athletics. The goal isn’t so much the technique of the exercise as it is in preparing for a proper outcome. In athletics, it is to improve the odds of winning with less injury. In education, mathematics is about honing the mind for more productive […]