Children’s Books of Science
Today I decided to send the following email. Usually, when I do such things it doesn’t make any difference. But it still never hurts to try. We’ll see what becomes of my efforts this time. Dear PZ Myers and richarddawkins.net,…
TA Training
Last week I had to attend an all day course for new TA’s (even though I won’t become a TA until at least next year). For lack of a better spot to record the notes I took during the class,…
OCW does GEB
From Reasonable Deviations: MIT has done a course titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. Video lectures are available through OCW.
the Maker Movement
I’ve been ruminating on the subject of personal liberation/gratification/independence that comes as a result of the do-it-yourself attitude. With sites such as Instructables, magazines like MAKE, radical changes in class structure occurring at major universities and development in the third…
The half-derivative
When I was in college, I once had this crazy notion of a half-derivative. We’d been taking nth-derivatives in physics, and I wondered “why stick to integers?”. Well, as it turned out, others had been there before me. At the…
Fortune is Fated — a short story
Once a long time ago (2003) I took an English course to satisfy UCLA’s bureaucratic notions that I should have a ‘well-rounded’ education. As part of this course we read short stories, and were required to write a mini-essay each…
Do it Yourself!
The phrase “Do it yourself!” can either be a dismissive command that indicates the speaker doesn’t wish to be bothered, or an empowering personal philosophy. All the great geniuses of history were avid proponents of personal independence in thought, word…
Random Ruminations
My thoughts are as entropic as the leaves falling off the trees this season (just about as colored too). Graduate School Applications <rant>I really dislike forms; actually I frothingly detest them. I don’t know why, but I have always hated…
Tuition-Free Education
From, My Biased Coin we have an argument for a Tuition Free Harvard. While, this is a really great idea, I don’t think it goes far enough. I actually think that the goal of providing a reputable education at zero…
The Sins of Public Education
I was reading Why Geography Matters by de Blij, and in the first chapter (page 15) he says But, as so often happens when social engineers get hold of a system that’s working well, the wheels came off. Professional educators…