Limericks are fun. Science limericks more so.
A woman in liquor production
Owns a still of exquisite construction.
The alcohol boils
Through magnetic coils.
She says that it’s “proof by induction.”
(You’ll want to think about the pun there for a little while.)
- via limerickdb.com
I just updated the SFN blogs to the latest version of WordPress MU (1.3.3, which corresponds to WordPress version 2.3.3) for both security reasons and the new features it brings.
Most notably, WordPress 2.3 now allows tagging — you can “tag” your posts with various labels the same way you can put it in categories. It’s up to you how you use them (or if you use them at all), but tags are a fairly big Internet fad and they’re rather handy for organization. I’m testing them out on this post.
Also, there is now a WordPress plugin installed called Spam Karma 2 that should help fend off spam on your blogs. Head over to the Plugins section of the WordPress Admin screen and enable the plugin to use it. It works out-of-the-box by capturing spam, and you can see the latest “harvest” by going to Manage->Spam Karma 2->Recent Spam Harvest.
Report any problems you have with WordPress here.
I’ve been active on the Internet for several years now and I’ve seen my fair share of teenagers and young ‘uns posting on the Internet. I’ve often read essays written by them, looked at school newspapers, and generally observed what they write. And I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: a significant portion of teenagers (meaning “high school students”), despite their extensive English education, still can’t write more than a few cohesive sentences.
To me, this is the result of outdated thinking on the teachers’ part.
I’m often rather disturbed by how mathematics is taught in school. Take, for example, the way I was taught the following (important) equation:
Those of you familiar with calculus will immediately recognize what this means. Those of you who aren’t should know that the above set of squiggly lines means something very important in the upper levels of confusing math.
When I first was taught the equation I was taught it by being exposed to it exactly as I just exposed it to you: an equation. There were some words with it too, but they made just as much sense as the equation did at the time. A few moments later the teacher explained what the equation means: one can find the definite integral of an equation using its antiderivatives.
But we were never taught why that’s the case.
Labs are a great idea for teaching students chemistry, physics, and all the other assorted sciences. They allow students to learn for themselves just how various laws and theories work, and to hopefully discover various phenomena themselves.
Okay, correction: Labs would be a great idea if they were used for the above purpose. But they aren’t.
I have recently been reminded of the agony that is literary analysis — that is, the science of dissecting an author’s work and determining what rhetorical techniques he used and for what purpose he used them.
I say “agony” because it is agony — you can spend hours staring at a few paragraphs attempting to eke out hidden meanings that are supposedly there.
I have, however, become convinced that is mainly a farce.
We’re now offering free blogs to everyone on SFN. If you have 50 posts and would like to talk about something science-related (not in every post, but in general, e.g. “at the lab today we…”), sign up!
A big thanks to dave for working out how to connect WordPress and vBulletin. If you find any problems, post them here or on the forums.
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