Masters make things look easy. A master photographer can pick up a disposable camera and take a beautiful picture; a master bodyworker sees patterns that cause pain in your body and efficiently corrects them; a master programmer rapidly produces working systems and debugs existing ones. There’s something appealing about being a master of [...]
Once in a while, someone will tell me that there’s nothing good on the Internet. However, while “there’s nothing good on TV” may be true, the long tail on the Internet means there are plenty of time-wasting opportunities available, if you take a few minutes to look. For example, for any hobby, there is undoubtedly [...]
New year’s day was my 98th birthday, at least according to my Facebook profile. It was a good day to learn a lesson about privacy and community.
For a long time, I simply ignored Facebook’s requirement that you enter your birthday “as a security measure.” How can Facebook knowing your birthday make anyone more secure? Perhaps [...]
I’ve always been careful not to reveal much personal information online and often distrust online vendors. Some of my friends are thus surprised that I have a homepage, a blog and now a tumblelog. However, compared to other friends just a few years younger than me, my online self is decidedly modest; those friends enthusiastically fill out their profiles [...]
What’s on prime time television these days? Looking at the dramas, offhand there are crime dramas (Law and Order, CSI), medical dramas (House, Grey’s Anatomy), mystery thrillers (24, Alias), family stories (Gilmore Girls, 7th Heaven), and people having sex (The OC, One Tree Hill). Maybe there’s something missing.
How about a drama about the lives of graduate students and professors? [...]
There are some articles making the rounds today on reddit about math education.
Seattle allows great diversity in its math curricula. This is not without risk:
In Seattle, schools have a lot of autonomy in how they teach math. The district has adopted textbooks and provides guidelines and timelines for teachers to follow, but doesn’t require [...]
Steve Yegge’s article, “math for programmers,” has been making the rounds. His thesis is that mathematical breadth in pre-college education would be more valuable than the attempt to provide mathematical depth in few apparently arbitrary areas (like geometry). He argues that specific math skills taught in grade school (like long division) are not necessarily of tremendous use to the [...]
This morning I’ve been thinking a bit about my early online antics. It’s been fun finding out what’s on the Internet about my old haunts.
I started out using a nice US Robotics modem that my dad had borrowed from work and dialing into local bulletin board systems using Telix for DOS. Mmm. I don’t remember the [...]
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