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Comment Re:Common Core: uniting the Right and the Left (Score 1) 273

by PvtVoid (#46479465) Attached to: Is the New "Common Core SAT" Bill Gates' Doing?

And, yes, this is how my boys are learning to do math.

My daughter is not in the Common Core yet, but this is how she is learning to do math at home. Last weekend, we worked on prime numbers and factorization with Legos. Take a stack of twelve legos:
"Can you divide twelve legos into twos?" Kid pulls the stack of twelve into piles of two, with none left over: "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into threes?" Kid pulls stacks of two apart to make stacks of three, with none left over: "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into fours?" Kid pulls four stacks of three apart to make three stacks of four, none left over. "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into fives?" Kid makes two stacks of five, with two blocks left over. "NO!"

Hmm...

Now try eleven legos...

Comment Re:Common Core: uniting the Right and the Left (Score 1) 273

by PvtVoid (#46476245) Attached to: Is the New "Common Core SAT" Bill Gates' Doing?

Really, invisibleserfscollar.com is ground zero for info on what is happening in the schools. Put up with the complex sentence structure there and read!

I'm sorry: did I say that Right Wing conspiracy nuts think Common Core is an attempt by the Feds to take over the schools? I stand corrected. They think it's a conspiracy by the United Nations to take over the schools.

I'm surprised that web site didn't mention chemtrails.

Comment Re:Common Core: uniting the Right and the Left (Score 1) 273

by PvtVoid (#46476183) Attached to: Is the New "Common Core SAT" Bill Gates' Doing?

Story problems certainly have their place, but teach students how to do the actual math first. And keep things relevant, don't confuse first graders by comparing pennies to cups of coffee http://roundtheinkwell.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/the-math-test.pdf

Not sure what you mean by actual math: calculating with numerals? As I understand it, one of the main points of common core is to get away from doing calculations by applying memorized tables of addition/subtraction/multiplication, because that's memorizing, not math. The story problems are the math.

The pennies-to-coffee cups thing in that over-hyped sample test is a little weird, for sure, but the rest of the test appeared entirely reasonable to me. Even though the terminology and notation were unfamiliar to me, I was able to quickly figure out the system and understand how to construct correct answers to the problems. Because I understand math, not just how to calculate.

Her's a few mor typos to mak you hapy.

Comment Common Core: uniting the Right and the Left (Score 1) 273

by PvtVoid (#46474587) Attached to: Is the New "Common Core SAT" Bill Gates' Doing?
The Common Core is the one thing in modern politics that is capable of generating agreement between right-wing conspiracy nuts and left-wing conspiracy nuts: the Left hates it because they think it's an attempt to undermine teacher's union, and the Right hates it because they think the Feds are trying to undermine local control of schools. So everybody hates it.

But seriously, have you actrually read the standardds. There's nothing especially objectionable in them, and there is a lot to like. Implementation, particularly an over-emphasis on standardized testing, could well present a problem, but the standards themselves are pretty clearly positive.

Comment Re:Lawrence Summers, save me! (Score 1) 384

by PvtVoid (#46454283) Attached to: Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math

I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest ...

Lost me right there.

I've found over my life that as soon as somebody starts their argument by complaining about "political correctness", it's a virtual certainty that the remainder of their argument is going to be a lame attempt to rationalize an odious bias. It's the politically correct way to start an argument by saying I'm not an X, but...

Comment Re:An exacerbated physicist (Score 2) 138

by PvtVoid (#46408257) Attached to: The Rise and Fall of Supersymmetry

According to the physics we know the chance of the Higgs boson having the mass is does is about one in 10^30.

Only if you know the measure on the space of parameters for the Higgs. Which you don't.

The question isn't "is there SUSY or not?" That question cannot be answered, because you can always push the SUSY breaking scale up to a little higher than the energy of your collider. SUSY will be a part of quantum gravity for the foreseeable future, since String Theory is not consistent without it as far as anybody can tell.

The real question is: "Does SUSY make useful predictions for detecting physics beyond the Standard Model?" The answer to that seems to be tending very strongly toward "No."

Comment Re:Feynman tutored me in QM at Caltech (Score 2) 106

by PvtVoid (#46390907) Attached to: Physicists Test Symmetry Principle With an Antimatter Beam

Seriously, you expect us to believe that you got tutored by Feynman in quantum mechanics for the double slit experiment, but that you can't figure out that the orientation of mirror reversal is due to the horizontal alignment of binocular vision (a trivial optics problem)? Bad troll.

So you think that if you close one eye and hold a book up to a mirror, you'll suddenly be able to read it?

Comment Re:Feynman tutored me in QM at Caltech (Score 0) 106

by PvtVoid (#46387899) Attached to: Physicists Test Symmetry Principle With an Antimatter Beam

> Does time go back and forth? I don't know.

Or it could be both :-)

The classic fallacy of Scientists is duality. Matter behaving as _both_ a wave AND particle is the best proof that:

One truth does not negate another truth

But to answer your question, Time is multi-dimensional. It depends on which level you are talking about ...

From our human, biological perspective / perception time is linear (male) (to prevent insanity.) The higher reality is that time flows in all directions (female) (non-linear) BUT one hasn't _experienced_ it all yet.

The Buddhists would say "There is only Now; the past, present and future are all Allusions" and they would partially be correct.

> "MAYBE THERE'S JUST ONE ELECTRON!" Feynman once shouted.

Indeed that is one possibility. That would explain the "Spooky Action From a Distance". It is the _same_ photon, just appearing in different phases at a different time/space.

That's the greatest thing about Feynman. He always kept an open mind. He was never a pseudo-skeptic. If he didn't know, he was motivated to suspend judgement until he knew more.

Modern science has become "Cargo Cult" thinking.

> because if there were significant amounts of antimatter in the Universe, we would expect there to be lots of 0.511 MeV gamma rays in the cosmic radiation but there is not.

First, the problem is we don't _know_ how much antimatter there is. We are making assumptions about 99.99999% of the universe based on less then %0.0000001 of what we can directly measure.

Second, how do you reckon that?

-- The question is not "Does extraterrestrial life exist?" but "Why the hell do we look so similar??" News in 2024.

Are you the Time Cube guy?

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