Dear person who thinks that "good code rarely needs commenting": the entire world wants to beat you senseless with a nine iron.

You're welcome.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Seriously. The entire story should be modded "troll".

Let's see ... you're investigating potential war crimes perpetrated by the CIA, so you store all of the records of the investigation on an air-gapped computer system located at a CIA facility in Virginia. What could possibly go wrong?

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...

The last person on the planet I want to have supplying curriculum to children is Rupert Murdoch. He's a one-man ignorance machine.

Serendipity will still happen in labs if you wear safety glasses.

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."

Whoops. Wallet is now empty. No vote for you.

Somebody stole a bunch of tulip bulbs!

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?