Swans on Tea

“Is Algebra Necessary?” Are You High?

Towards the end, Hacker’s reasoning gets just bizarre. He keeps emphasising how important “citizen statistics” is. I’m baffled as to how one could teach statistics in any useful way without the material he wants to throw out! Prerequisites: we needz them. “Is Algebra Necessary?” If you want to do statistics or economics, yes, it is.

One thing Blake doesn’t address (perhaps it’s in one of the links he provides) is part of the larger picture: the idea that because students are not graduating, we should lower the bar. Which makes a diploma quite meaningless; they are not simply participation awards.

edit: PZ Myers does bring it up in his post

So last week I posted a bit about Han-Solo-in-Carbonite ice trays, and ordered one (along with some NERF armament). I didn’t have any chocolate around to try that suggestion, but I was able to make some pats of butter, which would be fun if you had a Star Wars dinner party. Or something. Spread on some Millennium Falcon-shaped English muffins!

Not sure what the best technique is. This was softened and scraped into the mold and then zapped in the microwave for 10 seconds, because I wasn’t sure the butter was quite soft enough to fill the body features.