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Terrible headline. My first thought was that most teachers don’t teach math. Lo and behold, once you page through half the text, 65% of teacher don’t teach clim

by slumos 7y ago

Terrible headline. My first thought was that most teachers don’t teach math. Lo and behold, once you page through half the text, 65% of teacher don’t teach climate change because it is irrelevant to their subject. (Definitely we should be teaching climate change—in science classes. Maybe even history classes. But in >50% of all subjects? eh...)

labster 7y ago
It would be interesting to look at the Keeling curve in mathematics. Plenty of fun stuff there, you can see the seasons with a Fourier transform, see if the second derivative means we're all gonna die, etc. One of the weaknesses of my mathematics education was not enough real world applications, so I never cared about what I was learning. In Calc II I was so bored by Taylor series because when am I ever going to use this? Fast forward two years to meteorology classes and it's Taylor series and numerical methods everywhere.
- gus_massa 7y ago
  For a proper Fourier transform you need to wait until the first years of the university, perhaps the lasts year of secondary school in some places. Anyway, it doesn't look like a nice function for a Fourier transform, because the border effect will be huge. In the middle of secondary school, if you are lucky you can try fitting the function line a polinomial plus a trigonometric function with Excel. You have to pick an initial value of the parameters that is close to the function, otherwise solver will never get a good fit. I'm not sure how many math teacher are prepared for this. I have more faith in physics teachers that have a better training in dealing with noisy real word functions that have to be fitted to a model. > see if the second derivative means we're all gonna die, I think that even the worst model don't predict the humanity extinction, perhaps a huge amount of displacement and the following wars, problem for crops and food production and the following hunger, change of rain pattern, sea level increase, and other very nasty stuff, but not extinction. Also, the timeframe of most of the catastrophes is more than a century, so there is plenty of time to dance on the Titanic.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ErotemeObelus 7y ago
  > It would be interesting to look at the Keeling curve in mathematics. Plenty of fun stuff there, you can see the seasons with a Fourier transform.... Wait how?
  - labster 7y ago
    I know the data is messy so not sure how well it would work, but there's an obvious seasonal component to the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. So much that in the first year, the experimenters were worried that their data was garbage because how could CO₂ concentration be going down in a place so far from civilization? But it turns out as a whole, it's like the Earth takes a breath every year. IIRC it's mainly related to more land mass on the Northern Hemisphere, and the terrestrial biosphere is more variable than the oceans are. In theory, you should be able to decompose the signal into waves, and many will have a period of about one year. But I'm too lazy to actually try, er, I mean, an exercise left to the reader.

by slumos 7y ago

labster 7y ago

It would be interesting to look at the Keeling curve in mathematics. Plenty of fun stuff there, you can see the seasons with a Fourier transform, see if the second derivative means we're all gonna die, etc. One of the weaknesses of my mathematics education was not enough real world applications, so I never cared about what I was learning. In Calc II I was so bored by Taylor series because when am I ever going to use this? Fast forward two years to meteorology classes and it's Taylor series and numerical methods everywhere.

gus_massa 7y ago
For a proper Fourier transform you need to wait until the first years of the university, perhaps the lasts year of secondary school in some places. Anyway, it doesn't look like a nice function for a Fourier transform, because the border effect will be huge. In the middle of secondary school, if you are lucky you can try fitting the function line a polinomial plus a trigonometric function with Excel. You have to pick an initial value of the parameters that is close to the function, otherwise solver will never get a good fit. I'm not sure how many math teacher are prepared for this. I have more faith in physics teachers that have a better training in dealing with noisy real word functions that have to be fitted to a model. > see if the second derivative means we're all gonna die, I think that even the worst model don't predict the humanity extinction, perhaps a huge amount of displacement and the following wars, problem for crops and food production and the following hunger, change of rain pattern, sea level increase, and other very nasty stuff, but not extinction. Also, the timeframe of most of the catastrophes is more than a century, so there is plenty of time to dance on the Titanic.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ErotemeObelus 7y ago
> It would be interesting to look at the Keeling curve in mathematics. Plenty of fun stuff there, you can see the seasons with a Fourier transform.... Wait how?
- labster 7y ago
  I know the data is messy so not sure how well it would work, but there's an obvious seasonal component to the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. So much that in the first year, the experimenters were worried that their data was garbage because how could CO₂ concentration be going down in a place so far from civilization? But it turns out as a whole, it's like the Earth takes a breath every year. IIRC it's mainly related to more land mass on the Northern Hemisphere, and the terrestrial biosphere is more variable than the oceans are. In theory, you should be able to decompose the signal into waves, and many will have a period of about one year. But I'm too lazy to actually try, er, I mean, an exercise left to the reader.