CROWS COUNT
IN TEACHING MATH FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS, I oft shared the tale of a farmer plagued by crows feasting on his crops. The corvids weren’t fooled by a scarecrow. And they’d … Continue reading
SCIENCE (AND GENERATIVE A.I.) IN ACTION
THIS ALL STARTED WITH AN INTERESTING LITTLE ITEM in the “News” section of AAAS Science magazine, May 3, 2024. Its heading read “Physiology: All Dog Noses Are Created Equal.” And … Continue reading
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
THERE’S IRONY TO BE HAD in my having a Ph.D. in mathematics. This is at least in part because I spent the majority of my career working in automotive journalism, … Continue reading
TIMEKEEPING—OBJECTIVE, GEOMETRIC, NUMERICAL, FRACTIONAL, DIGITAL
THE SANDS OF TIME ARE ONLY ONE way we describe its passage. The positions of stars and angled points of a sundial are geometric. We have numerals: “three fifty-two.” Also, … Continue reading
RPI BEATS WPI—QUANTUM-WISE!
BACK IN MY DAY, WORCESTER POLY always scheduled its homecoming weekend for when it played Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—because a victory was all but assured. However, I must report that RPI … Continue reading
HOLMES AND A.I. PART 2
YESTERDAY IN PART 1, WE BEGAN EXPLORING how attuned the world’s greatest consultive detective would have been with Artificial Intelligence. We continue here in Part 2 with more analyses. There’s … Continue reading
A.I. DOOMERISM? PART 2
YESTERDAY, we learned about aspects of Artificial Intelligence, both good and bad, described in Paul Taylor’s LRB review of two books on the subject. The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and … Continue reading
A.I. DOOMERISM? PART 1
BACK IN 2020 PAUL TAYLOR taught me what little I know about “SIR modeling,” “Susceptible, Infectious, Recovered” as they relate to epidemics such as Covid. This time around, Taylor writes … Continue reading
MATHS VERSUS MATH
THE ENGLISH CALL IT “MATHS,” WHEREAS we ’Mericans call it “math.” And in a sense, this monolithic view of math’s many elements is reflected in math instruction in the U.S. … Continue reading
A WELL-EMPLOYED (AND WELL-TRAVELED) DEVICE
WHAT A THOUGHT-PROVOKING HEADLINE: “This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In,” by Franz Lidz and Clara Vannucci, The New York Times, March 12, 2024. This and following images by Clara Vannucci … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 