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math

Belief in God Boils Down to a Gut Feeling – (LiveScience)

“people who went with their intuition on the math test were found to be one-and-a-half times more likely to believe in God …

Cone-Headedness

I spent part of the afternoon working out the properties of a cone without using references other than remembering the requisite formulas regarding circles and right triangles. (Yes, I do stuff like this for fun. #dontjudgeme)

Mathematics, Physics, and A Hard Day’s Night

Using mathematics and the physics of sound, one of the mysteries of rock ‘n’ roll is examined: how did the Beatles play …

More Metric Stuff

I’ve gotten a lot of emails about my articles about the necessity of the U.S. converting to metric soon (President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter; Some Practical Consequences of Going Metric). Let me address a few of them.

Some Practical Consequences of Going Metric

My recent entry: President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter has generated a fair amount of email (thank you, by the way). Among the comments were concerns about various aspects of doing the conversion, specifically about all that math to go from one system to another. Then there were comments about the realities of conversion. Let me try to address both of those items.

Fixing the Education System

As with the weather, many people complain about the state of education but don’t really offer up suggestions for changing it. Here’s one proposal to overhaul the current system.

Musing on… The Calculator Turns 40

How old am I? I remember when there weren’t any electronic calculators. I remember when the mathematical shortcut of choice was the slide rule (I still have two of them available should a massive EMP wipe out all electronic access). Then came the late-mid 70s. My dad brought home one of the first electronic calculators, an