The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

This is an old essay well worth reading. We have been given great and powerful tools that we need to use to find out more about the world around us.

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Classic Films, Back to College - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything: "Now this is science! A fifty-year-old anthropology professor, who has done fieldwork in primitive societies in faraway lands, realizes that she knows almost nothing about the lives of undergraduate students at the American university where she teaches."

How easily we forget our own past, much less history. Okay, admittedly someone who becomes a professor has different motivations compared to most students who just want to get a "good job."

But this is going to be very useful to many students particularly homeschoolers who go on to college. Most homeschoolers don't have the tolerance to BS that is so prevalent in most bureaucracies and college is just another bureaucracy.

Most people stick with the familiar, I just I was very unusual as I went to college without knowing anyone. I made friends, some of whom I am still in contact with, and found a wonderful wife.

I was one of the "witches," I asked questions about things I didn't understand and couldn't find an answer to and that wouldn't be on the test. But yeah, there was that "go along to get along" riptide in there.

"Go along to get along" is indoctrinated into children as soon as they get into school. It never goes away. I do think that we may be programmed for that in general but it doesn't allow for much innovation.

I am looking for a good home broadband provider, the first on the list was Comcast and when I mentioned that I used a Mac they started telling me I should get a Winbox to be like everyone else. I hung up on them at that point. I spend my days "fixing" PCs, I like my Mac since it gives me way less trouble and I can actually get work done. All they need to do is provide an Internet connection they don't have to care what kind of computer I have to connect to it.

Quote of the Day

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather
how to think, than what to think - rather to improve
our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than
to load the memory with thoughts of other men."

- Bill Beattie

Moebius strip riddle solved at last - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Moebius strip riddle solved at last - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "Popularised by the Dutch artist MC Escher, a Moebius strip entails taking a strip of paper or some other flexible material.

You take one end of the strip, twist it through 180 degrees, and then tape it to the other end.

This creates a loop that has an intriguing quality, dazzlingly exploited by Escher, in that it only has one side."

Sometimes, math is hard.

The Open Library

About Us
(The Open Library): "What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—our planet's cultural legacy."

Ambitious: Yes,
Doable: Yes
Worth it: Yes

How Would a Duck Count

We all know how we count from 1-10 on our fingers but how would a duck make a number system.

Ducks have 3 main fingers on each foot. So they might start with 1 and instead of their last toe being 6, like we might use, it would be their ten. So they would count 1 2 3 4 5 10, 11 12 13 14 15 20, and so on. What we call eight they would call 12. We call this base 6, because they use only 6 numbers as the basis of their number system.

A horse with only 2 hoofs would count 1 10, 2 20, 3 30 and so on. We call this base 2 also known as binary. Counters use base two as their native language as they are made up of switches that can only be on or off. Computers count like this. 0 1, 10 11, 100 101 110 111, and so on.

Schoolhouse Rock's Little Twelve Toes does the same thing with base 12.

Computers also use base16 a lot, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F, 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1, 1B 1C 1D 1E 1F, and so on.

The ancient Mesopotamians in Babylon used a base 60. In our terms they go through all our numbers, and our entire alphabet almost twice before getting to use 0 to create their equivalent to 10.

Churchill dropped from England's history syllabus - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Churchill dropped from England's history syllabus - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Not a good thing. Somewhere I remember reading that if you can control what people read from history, you can control them.