Steuard

110 ms·

751.
by Steuard 14y ago
You're probably thinking of "Hostess", by Isaac Asimov: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostess_%28short_story%29
752.
by Steuard 14y ago
Absolutely. So wouldn't it be neat if premedical students and business majors had already seen a thorough stats class in high school, so that their college-level stats classes could spend less time on the basics and more time on those subtl
753.
by Steuard 14y ago
Oh, don't get me wrong: I was served very well by today's standard math sequence. I learned fascinating stuff in precalc, and calculus was a revelation and a profound joy. Prof. Benjamin's argument favoring statistics instead was a tough
754.
by Steuard 14y ago
Most basic statistics classes that I've seen don't require calculus. My wife (who's taught stats in college many times) claims that they don't really use algebra all that much, either (you aren't generally solving quadratics or anything),
755.
by Steuard 14y ago
More charitably, she wasn't lying, she was just ignorant (and therefore wrong). An innumerate person might simply not recognize all those extra marks as having any meaning at all, or at least not as having anything to do with those dreaded
756.
by Steuard 14y ago
I may not entirely understand your question. My wife has taught statistics college statistics many times (including Gaussian distributions), and her classes have never had a calculus prerequisite. Are some topics easier to understand if you
757.
by Steuard 14y ago
It's easy to recognize that the author's arguments could apply just as well to any academic subject: literature, history, you name it. ("We should just teach 'citizen reading', where students learn to read recipes and furniture assembly ins
758.
by Steuard 14y ago
Do you have a link where I can read up on this? I'm willing to believe you, but it sounds too good to be true.
759.
by Steuard 14y ago
It's an interesting analysis, but I'm extremely dubious about the degree of extrapolation going on here. It's hard to imagine that the past 25 years have been typical in human history, or for that matter that the past 125 years have been. I
760.
by Steuard 14y ago
Well, to give an explicit example (sorry, non-specialists!), consider the nonlinear sigma model action for superstring theory in an arbitrary background geometry (that is, arbitrary spacetime metric G and NS-NS B-field; we'll ignore the dil
761.
by Steuard 14y ago
Mind you, string theory itself includes torsion: the Riemann tensor that arises in (e.g.) curved backgrounds includes contributions from the NS-NS B-field that correspond precisely to the effects of torsion. I don't think that non-zero tors
762.
by Steuard 14y ago
I don't know how much of an issue this is in practice, but if the Google favicon service only requires the hostname then it will sometimes get the icon wrong. Any individual page can specify its own icon via a link element in the page heade
763.
by Steuard 14y ago
And just to be clear, NoScript catches these even when it is set to allow JavaScript by default! Running NoScript in "Allow Scripts Globally" mode breaks almost no sites and still protects you against lots of nasty attacks.
764.
by Steuard 14y ago
First off, name calling doesn't encourage polite conversation. Second, progressive enhancement isn't "grandpa" thinking, it's good design, and more important today than ever. (A cursory search turned up .net magazine declaring it the #1 web
765.
by Steuard 14y ago
Cute. When NoScript is in "Allow scripts globally" mode, the only things it blocks are particularly nasty vulnerabilities (its anti-XSS and anti-clickjacking features, mainly). As I said from the start, that mode presents no problem at all
766.
by Steuard 15y ago
Using Firefox 12 with NoScript installed, your site is entirely unviewable. Even in its most permissive mode (which works for the vast majority of sites), NoScript does block cross-site scripts that it considers dangerous. On your site, I g
767.
by Steuard 15y ago
Whoops! I had a feeling I was being careless at the end there. It should have been 30x20 years rather than 90x20, so just 600 years until Moore's law is absolutely finished regardless of technology. (That shouldn't feel all that much closer
768.
by Steuard 15y ago
Much of unglue.it's goal seems to be to make out of print books available again, but their model could have great potential to democratize education. If any popular introductory physics textbook (or math, or CS, or whatever) from the last
769.
Crowdsourcing to CC license (text)books: Physics here; what else?(unglue.it)
1 points by Steuard 15y ago|1 comments
770.
by Steuard 15y ago
Here's some napkin math on the black hole argument. Information is essentially equivalent to entropy: the entropy S = k * log M, where k is Boltzmann's constant and log M is the number of bits encoding the information. Now, it turns out to
771.
by Steuard 15y ago
The really neat physics argument limiting Moore's law (to my eye) is the ultimate limit on the information content in a given region of space. It turns out to be impossible to pack entropy (and thus information) more densely than in a bla
772.
by Steuard 15y ago
One of the most egregious "old media disrespects new media" stories I've seen was last year when The Daily Mirror lifted a complete blog entry by comedian Dave Gorman and printed it in the paper. They did give him credit, but never asked pe
773.
by Steuard 15y ago
The article gives no indication of why one would implement all this complicated CSS just to duplicate the effect of the "title" attribute. After all, tooltips are already a built-in function of every browser, and users are familiar with how
774.
by Steuard 15y ago
If you're calling any female co-workers "girls" in conversations at or about the workplace, you're doing it wrong. There is a long history of society downplaying women's contributions in the workforce by using cutesy terms like "girls", and
775.
by Steuard 15y ago
It's not just that he doesn't say! He explicitly rejects the notion that he ought to say. As far as I'm concerned, that means he's declared to all the world that he is not actually doing mathematics.
776.
by Steuard 15y ago
Huh. This is not my field, so I am hesitant to comment in detail. However, a few things quickly strike me as troubling about the original paper: * The work is based on "a new applied point of view on infinite and infinitesimal numbers", the
777.
by Steuard 15y ago
Interesting: on my Mac laptop running Firefox (11.0), physically clicking the trackpad works, but a single tap (my usual) does nothing. A double tap does work, but it selects the first word in the menu as well. It's a cute demo, but as it s
778.
by Steuard 15y ago
Are you suggesting that "Talking Tom Cat" is not a children's toy? Because otherwise, you're sounding more than a little self-righteous here. I don't know the answers, but I think it's reasonable to ask whether technology can make a posit
779.
by Steuard 15y ago
This is a project from a Physics Education Research group, so the topic is pretty much their bread and butter. I think they probably hope that their methods will apply throughout the sciences and beyond eventually, but you can't blame them
780.
by Steuard 15y ago
I think a lot of scientists see this boycott as a beginning of that process. But even with open access, the scholarly community needs to find a way to recognize worthwhile research that is at least as effective as the current peer review sy

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