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Fraction of Bachelor’s Degrees Earned by Women, by Major
via APS Physics

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Relevant to my interests.

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MIT edX: Classical Mechanics with Walter Lewin

8.01x is an online version of Classical Mechanics, which is the first of MIT’s introductory physics courses. In addition to the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, and kinetic gas theory, a variety of other interesting topics are covered, such as resonance phenomena, musical instruments, astronomical phenomena such as binary stars, neutron stars, black holes, stellar collapse, and supernovae. You will also be given a peek into the intriguing world of quantum mechanics.

Starts Sept. 9, 2013.

Register —›

“On August 27, 1783 in Paris, [Benjamin] Franklin witnessed the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight.”

“Sir Joseph Banks, a leading botanist and president of the British Royal Society from 1778 to 1820, … corresponded with [Franklin] in Paris. Although ostensibly a man of science, Banks looked at ballooning from a Newtonian worldview, and wrote to Franklin that, “I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania [until] some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to society or science is proposed.”

Franklin had told Banks that experimenting with balloons would someday “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.”

He answered Banks’ objection by writing that “It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied. When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.”

When a spectator at one of the early balloon launchings asked Franklin what this new invention could be used for, Franklin gave his famous answer: “What is the use of a new-born baby?””

— Benjamin Franklin, on the use of hot air balloons. Quotes via The Schiller Institute & Wiki: [87].

“Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education

…

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom.

zenpencils:

CHRIS HADFIELD An astronaut’s advice

(via itsfullofstars)

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{ Better Explained }:

How do you draw an elephant?

• Pencil the structure using ovals, rectangles, and so on
• Ink the final result, taking the lines you want
• Erase the underlying pencil structure, revealing the elephant

…

Is tracing different from drawing? You bet. Tracing is mimicry — we don’t know why a line is there. We just start in one corner and work our way around. Sure, we might make a pretty elephant — but can we draw one with a different trunk? Standing on two hind legs? Probably not.

Math is similar: we “teach” by tracing a student through the steps of a proof. But there’s an underlying pencil structure that was in the mind’s eye of the proof’s author that we’re not seeing. We’re walking the student along the drawing (“Here is the head, here is the trunk, here is the leg”) without show the mindset that created the proof (“The head is an oval, connected to a larger oval for the body; the legs are cylinders, which we smooth out.”).

If we’re lucky, the student generalizes the steps and creates their own pencil structure.

…

Sometimes we create “nice-looking elephants” through trial and error. Later on, we realize there’s a common structure that can simplify future efforts. True learning is about discovering and exploring these structures, not simply generating the pretty elephants.

••••••

OS:

I love Better Explained. I wish they covered more topics, but I feel like I’ve been looking for this my whole life — the intuitive explanation.

Funny; it reminds me of another { 3rd grade story }: besides that it was a group project wherein we had to write something long-ish, the context is irrelevant. The two girls I was sitting with were editing what I’d written, and were trying their hardest to convince me that my paragraph was too long (or too short?) because “paragraphs are 5 sentences long”. Someone had taught them that, without explaining the point that a paragraph depends on how long it takes to convey a thought. A creative writer knows that a paragraph can be a single word or three pages, as necessary.

For the longest time, I inwardly face-palmed thinking about that. Who was to blame? A bad teacher, or students who couldn’t grasp subtleties and abstractions? But… how can I laugh at them now? Truly, my entire mathematical experience (up until recently) has been exactly this way. I’ve been tracing mathematical elephants.

Einstein … was mightily influenced by what the ex–patent clerk called Mach’s Principle[:] “the inertia of every element of matter is due to its interaction with all the other elements of matter in the universe.”

We haven’t fully followed that investigative road, Mead said. “Instead what we’ve done is we’ve treated isolated objects as if all their attributes were just given us, and [we] haven’t asked where they came from,” he said. “Things like the inertia of an object, the rest energy of an object, the velocity of light — all those things. We have a list of fundamental constants that we’re not allowed to ask where they come from.”

If we want to get that stalled 100-year-old revolution unstuck, Mead said, we’ve got to ask – and discover – where those constants come from, and not just believe in them as handed down by academics and buried in mountains of math. We need to discover their basis in the interactions and interrelationships of all matter in the universe.

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acalc:

olena:

acalc:

How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets

Does the prospect of being a puppet make you uncomfortable? It does me. The article talks about the almost unimaginable amount of data Netflix collects and analyzes based on your activities for the purpose of capitalizing. Their House of Cards is an initial result of that ‘algorithmic focus group’. And the article hints at how this is becoming more and more prevalent across all of society. After reading this, it’s obvious that traditional TV fiction is done. It’s over. Time to go home. The future is the Internet, and it starts with Netflix.

But, all in all, it’s kind of depressing what this thick, data-driven approach portends. What good are movies, shows, video games, and other modern media if they’re increasingly created—directly or indirectly—from empirical observations of endless data? Where goes the potential of art? How do you transform as an individual by being constantly accommodated—even if it’s a niche accommodation—and not being challenged? In prior times, some of these things could be made with an appreciable amount of creative risk and freedom, and they were unexpected, spoke to something in the collective consciousness. But if the end game is to know the audience so thoroughly that you can creatively anticipate and accommodate their every whim and desire, the possibility of art ceases. If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things generated from minds incompatible with their catered kingdom.

That’s one aspect of the modern Internet that I have always kind of loathed: the physics at work that makes us the rulers of our own skull-sized kingdoms, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace. And to paraphrase another person, we continue to paradoxically spend our time together but alone.

Yes,

But Netflix is not a place for art, just as TV is not a place for art (was it ever?), just as any regular movie theater is not a place for art. We have to remember that.

This isn’t about the internet — there are other places online and “out there” to find real, creative work that has nothing to do with targeting, etc.

Corporations will always do what they do (until pretty soon when, you know, they can’t because we’re all fucked over and out of resources), but I don’t agree that “If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things …”.

Every day, someone out there tries to cater to me. How many times have I pressed the “No, this Ad is not relevant” button on Hulu? Countless. And Hulu will never understand that anything they throw at me, I will not find relevant, because I don’t give a shit about any of it.

That’s the point and role of art, and the artist. By nature the artist is a contrarian, by nature art defies accommodation.

But that’s the artist. The real problem is { teaching others the value of art }, and propagating the notion that they should go look for things that make them uncomfortable. Hasn’t that long been the problem, even prior to this “information age”?

Yes, accommodation is commonplace. I was trying to suggest more of a systemic accommodation in what is traditionally considered artistic mediums, something like an evolution that creeps up over time, a kind of sudden ubiquity—like cellphones or the Internet—that becomes part of the fabric of the everyday. There will be people who see it happening and resist it, but eventually it becomes the cultural status quo, and people in general lose the ability to introspect on what’s going on; and once the previous paradigm cedes to the past, it more than likely becomes at most an historical curiosity.

Netflix might not be a place for art in general, but that doesn’t preclude it from containing art. They still offer some of the greatest cinematic works known to the world. Also, when I wrote that, I had a TV show in mind that I would classify as art: Twin Peaks. Others can make arguments for other shows—I’m personally not a huge fan of the medium—but Twin Peaks, being borne significantly from the mind of the auteur David Lynch, has that certain magic that I’ve spoken about on numerous occasions.

As for teaching others the value of art, yes, I believe I agree in principle with that being the real problem. I just don’t know how much being exposed to the principles and potentials of art through anything approaching an academic lens actually carries over throughout any given individual’s life. I honestly don’t know if there’s a solution outside of a component of abstractly ‘feeling’ art in the world. And if that’s the only solution—that art applies to those who are somehow innately receptive to art—then I believe systemic accommodation has the ability, over time, to anesthetize that facility—if not outright undermining it.

But my ultimate point still remains: that systemic accommodation leads everyone into their separate, subjective ‘skull-sized kingdoms’. Art loses—completely—all objective measure (or any hope of reaching that) and only means something subjectively. It leads people deeper into their private universes, and I think there are social/cultural ramifications for that.

I see. I can’t disagree (nor wish to) with your main point. We already see so much of that through democratization — I feel like a broken record repeating this, but there’s truly a flattened plane when people in general begin to believe that next-to-nothing holds objective value. Everything is the same. But is it really? Not that this is black-and-white; it has its usefulness.

And when you say systemic accommodation, I can take it you mean on this large of a scale, where it’s increasingly difficult (for anyone not predisposed to looking for something else) to happen upon something new by accident.

As for teaching the value of art as a solution to spread receptivity of it, I agree again about the academic lens not being a good tool. I’ll use my own experience: I thought of physics as just another subject to “get through” through most of school. Stupidly enough, I only got interested in it after investigating pseudoscience. Through the “academic lens” (if this is what you mean) the sublimity, importance, Hell, grandeur of it all was entirely lost. Schools mostly don’t cater to passion as we’d like to think, but to a practical, productive work-force.

It has to be something else.

Maybe this something else will be a much-needed and long-awaited revolution for culture just as, say, Khan Academy was for education.

*PS:

Just one more thing;
Part of why you’re right about the spread of this type of accommodation is exactly at the root of that word.

On some level, I don’t know if anything will ever help this being the attitude of most people, especially if we don’t take care of other issues first.

And it isn’t because they’re lazy sheeple, but because so many, in this system, work too damned long and hard to want to go home and make themselves uncomfortable some more. A desire for uncomfortable experiences and ideas are likely a mark of someone privileged to have time for those things, or someone faced with those things in life so much that they become a main concern.

But I say that totally loosely. I don’t know what it says about kids in the suburbs, for example. I think a lot of that audience lives in a certain style of comfort that abhors anything “weird”, different, uncomfortable. They have time, money, and say that they’re bored so often. So why don’t they seek those things? A lack of exposure to them in the first place, a community that discourages them, etc…

And in the population who can handle it in the first place (have the stability to do so — time, money, quality of life), should they? Or is it some unseen necessity of cultural systems that things like art, philosophy, and high math and science should be left to the relatively few? After all, there’s study upon study of people with minds for those things also having a propensity for depression, etc.

I think I’ve digressed quite a bit; just something I wonder about sometimes.

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wildcat2030:

The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook

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Textbook publishers argue that their newest digital products shouldn’t even be called “textbooks.” They’re really software programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments. But delivering them is just the beginning. No old-school textbook was able to be customized for each student in the classroom. The books never graded the homework. And while they contain sample exam questions, they couldn’t administer the test themselves. One publisher calls its products “personalized learning experiences,” another “courseware,” and one insists on using its own brand name, “MindTap.” For now, this new product could be called “the object formerly known as the textbook.” (via Don’t Call Them Textbooks - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education)

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Everyone in the modern world should have at least a basic understanding of art.

I say this because of the countless times I’ve heard “I don’t understand art” either in private conversation or in popular media, and the phrase is left at just that. There’s no desire to try understand it, because the value of it has never been taught, either.

And I don’t mean like in elementary school when a guest “art teacher” comes in and shows you paintings by Picasso and tells you how famous he and his work are, how strange the art is, introduces you to the term “starving artist”, explains that what he did was called “Cubism” and that it basically meant rearranging people’s faces, and all the while with the expressed attitude that “people like you and I” aren’t really meant to grasp these things.

I have one specific memory from 3rd grade when our class was making poster boards about the rain forest. I was crafting a paper dragonfly, and my teacher came over and told me “You shouldn’t use that blue and purple tissue paper for the wings because that’s not realistic. You should use the cellophane.” (This woman also HATED lollipop trees.) In my bewildered 8-year-old mind, all I could think was something like — though less articulate than — “Are you kidding me? You actually think that clear cellophane is going to make this construction-paper dragonfly look realistic and that this is going to look good on a giant green board? Versus something opaque and colorful that would give the impression of the colors reflected off of the dragonfly’s wings while still managing to stand out and be interesting?” Sometimes showing what appears true without actually including everything that is literally seen is much closer to the actual truth and easier for the eye and mind to register than when we try to be too “realistic”.  As Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” But school is often like work-force training: resistance is futile, so you just nod, smile, and use the cellophane.

So what I do mean by art education is: the ability to recognize new patterns as well as to re-organize known ones. Comprehension of symbolism. The ability to see past the surface of a thing and recognize its underlying system, to re-organize that, think about other ways it could be put together — find new uses for things. Understanding arbitrariness. Understanding that experiencing an art work can be much like a scientific test: an isolated and sometimes psychological experiment that can only happen under specific circumstances, though less focused on the scientific method and results. The ability to deal with and comprehend foreign experiences or ideas; to entertain an alien thought. To be able to consider an idea or even reality itself from various perspectives… All creative and critical thinking. Survival skills, especially for living on an increasingly more connected earth where encountering newness is more of a daily reality for an average person than ever before.

But, art education is extremely dangerous if you want to have a culture wherein everyone follows the rules.

Dragonfly extremely related. By { myu-myu }.

…I’m especially glad to hear that you like the exam format (try until you get it).

Working at Udacity is really exciting. We get to try to rethink education every day. Often it’s easy to get stuck in our preconceived ideas of what education ought to look like, and these ideas are hard to approach objectively. One of the Udacity decisions that I’m most excited about is the way we do our exams.

Education shouldn’t be a sieve. The goal isn’t to separate students into “those who get it” and “those who don’t” groups, yet this notion seems to be the commonly held one as far as assessment is concerned. What’s the point in that!? Education should be empowering. Instructors should be ashamed when they have students in the “those who don’t get it” group.

I think the fundamental problem is that people who become instructors were often in the “get it” group, and they like to attribute that to something special about themselves. It makes them feel smart. They want to believe that there really are smart people and not-smart people in the world and that they are the smart ones.

But that is complete nonsense. I’ve done a lot of tutoring, and I’ve never met anyone who actually couldn’t understand physics. I’ve just met people who haven’t been taught in a way that makes sense to them. Everyone is smart.

When you really believe that everyone is smart, assessment is no longer about identifying who has ability. It’s about confirming that everyone does. If you can’t ace the exam, it doesn’t mean you have failed. It means you haven’t yet fully succeeded. This, to me, is an infinitely better approach to learning.

{ Networks: An Introduction } by Mark Newman
& { Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide } by Karl F. Kuhn

I’m really excited about both of these books and want to share them with those of you who have interests in science (physics), networks, and systems theory.

Of course, I’d read good reviews about both of these prior, but actually beginning to read them solidified any preconceived notions: I downloaded them both in one evening, meant to check them out quickly before tuning out for the night… and ended up staying up until 4 am. It’s rare to find a non-fiction so engaging, especially as both of these are quasi-textbooks.

I’ve put Basic Physics on hold momentarily, but got 10% through Networks — ~ 72 pages. (Tilde because both of these are available on Kindle! Amazing, for someone who often reads on the go and likes to take notes while reading (without carrying a whole bunch of crap around), and to have instant dictionary access (& Wikipedia where there’s wifi) for learning about new terms.)

As the author states, Networks increases in difficulty with each chapter. Not sure I’ll be able to have a grasp on some of the matter in the later chapters just yet, but so far (through Chapter 5) it’s easy to understand and I’ve learned quite a bit.

Basic Physics is basic, but offers hope for anyone seeking to gain a deeper understanding of nature, “from the ground up”. Just like Networks, it’s easy to follow — no BS. A good companion for an interactive online class like Udacity’s { PH100 }. …And well worth $9.99.

{ The Public Domain Review }:

France in the Year 2000 (XXI century) – a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910, originally in the form of paper cards enclosed to cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards. They depicted the world of the future, in 2000. The first cards were produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists.

(All images via Wikimedia Commons).

realcleverscience asked: Just a comment: I think many people - including myself - know that the Greeks and others had primitive notions of evolution, but they never discussed probable causes for it. The Islamic quote is interesting precisely bc it seems to touch on natural selection. That said, yeah, the educational system is woefully inadequate.

Certainly, the intellectual prowess of the Greeks hasn’t gone unnoticed…
sort of:

My comment about the educational system… mostly a reaction to the canon of what is passed on — all mostly as singular stories sans connections. At least, that’s been my experience in schools.

This post reminded me that I didn’t even know about Eratosthenes (!) until watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos a few of years ago (well into college), and because Eastern contributions to science & maths, like Al Jahiz’s, are often (largely) ignored. Again, my experience, but also basing that off of similar complaints heard ‘round the web.

As for the Anaximander addition, it was mostly for my own archival/research purposes — I’m interested in abiogenesis and had no idea about him, prior.

re: { Struggle for Existence }, 800’s CE