Linguistic Limitations
Someone in my earshot remarked, not many weeks ago, that surely some languages are better than others because they can express more advanced ideas, like those in modern science. More [...]
A Call for Gravitas in New Hampshire’s Custom Curriculum
I hear that New Hampshire recently passed a law allowing parents to register objections to curricular content, and (if the popular response is accurate) obliging schools to provide an acceptable [...]
Students, New Technologies, and Obsolete Metaphors
Some of my students have been commenting recently about how hard it is to use certain software, with its counterintuitive and apparently arbitrary interfaces and conventions. This is software that [...]
Science is So Darn Hard?
The New York Times recently printed an article about why science majors leave for other subjects. Apparently it’s because science is so darn hard. (C. Drew, “Why science majors change [...]
Putting History of Science to Classroom Use
We often hear how the humanities don’t offer much practical benefit, so here is a STEM application that I taught to some university physics students last week. It’s about misconceptions. [...]
Whose history is science?
A month or two ago, the Dutch government announced that the Museum Boerhaave would have to raise a certain amount of money to fund itself, or it’d be closed. In [...]
Pythias’s Teeth
From time to time someone tells me, usually attributing the idea to Bertrand Russell, about how Aristotle clearly can’t have been much of an experimental scientist because he wrote that [...]
Dividing the Circle
We all know that there are 360 degrees in a circle. We are given two reasons for this: one is that there are roughly 360 days in a year, so [...]
Did the Moon Really Cause the Earthquake?
There has been some attribution of Japan’s recent earthquake to the moon being at perigee. This claim is due to some astrologers, not astronomers but, as I mentioned in my [...]
Let’s Talk Astrology
It pains many science teachers that newspapers carry astrological and meteorological forecasts with about the same frequency, and often on the same page, and give us far less science news. [...]
