The downside, as it were, is that mistakes would tend to hit you in the face. This beats the hell out of the juggling my grad-school housemates did.
Because Graham is on Holiday and Chun Yao's Dead
Despite the fact that this is satire and thus includes some level of exaggeration, it does do a rather nice job of highlighting some of the frustration of science outreach. Not everything can be condensed down into an information mcnugget or two, and there are subjects where you really need a decent background in physics to understand what’s going on, even at a superficial level. That frustration comes to a head when you meet someone who thinks that advanced science should be understandable to them even without any background schooling, and those same folks seem to be the ones who hold you at fault when they don’t understand. (They also seem to conclude that it’s wrong if it doesn’t make sense to them, but that’s another level of frustration)
h/t to Schrödinger’s hat
Say It Loud, Too, So I Understand
Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast
[S]ome languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust — or at least that’s how they sound.
But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn’t whiz by in half the original time, after all, which is what it would have to do if the same lines were being spoken at doubletime.
…
Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was.
Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photo Winners
Super Space: Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photo Winners
On Sept. 8, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian, announced winners from the third annual contest, which drew more than 700 entries. Prizes went to participants from four main categories — Deep Space, Our Solar System, Earth and Space, and Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year — as well as three special awards.
If Wishes were Horsepower
Unbalanced is Unfair
‘Shape of the Earth – Both Sides Have a Point’
The argument is that the mainstream news media attempts at all costs to appear “balanced”, by giving both sides of any dispute equal footing — as opposed to simply trying to report what is actually accurate. Thus, in the debate over climate change, they give undue emphasis to arguments claiming that climate change lacks scientific consensus, when in fact the opposite is true.
It's Sports-Science Analogy Time, Again
Jon Huntsman, the lone voice of scientific sanity in the US Republican Presidential race
It’s like trying to explain the behaviour of football players without acknowledging the existence of a game of football. Why are these strange people running around after a sphere and kicking it to each other? What is the significance of the rectangular white box at the end? Why don’t they use their hands? Sure, we could posit some “laws” of “Association Football”, but that’s just a theory!
Similar to something I observed a while back. The difference here is that it’s in application to people who are vying to be leaders of a country, and to me it’s scary to think that the list is almost exclusively comprised of people who put ideology first, force the facts to fit and toss out anything that doesn’t.
The Bad Astronomer mentions this in reference to Rick Perry’s baffling “Galileo got outvoted for a spell” remark: Republican candidates, global warming, evolution, and reality. Galileo vs the church was not two scientific schools of thought duking it out, it was the suppression of science by holders of an ideological truth. Which is what is going on here, except that Perry got it exactly backwards.
Update: if you don’t want sports* analogies, here’s another.
Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don’t have a clue what it’s actually about.
*Though I’m sure there’s an xkcd cartoon where sex is a sport, and it does fulfill many of the basic requirements: physical activity, somebody possibly winning (I finished first. And you, not at all**) and I will never be mistaken for a professional practitioner.
** Which is why you shouldn’t keep score
Shooting Back at Helicopters
What teachers really want to tell parents
In all honesty, it’s usually the best teachers who are giving the lowest grades, because they are raising expectations. Yet, when your children receive low scores you want to complain and head to the principal’s office.
Please, take a step back and get a good look at the landscape. Before you challenge those low grades you feel the teacher has “given” your child, you might need to realize your child “earned” those grades and that the teacher you are complaining about is actually the one that is providing the best education.