Recent Posts - page 74

  • Bullying Three Ways

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    I originally started drafting this post well before last night’s presidential debate and the follow-up by Van Jones, but these events have slightly rearranged what I need to say. This thread actually started on September 27 with four talks (to different… Read More ›

  • Too Like the Lightning

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    It’s definitely necessary to avoid spoilers on this one. Ada Palmer’s dark novel, Too Like the Lightning, is partly fantasy, mostly science fiction, and completely fascinating. Oh, did I mention philosophy? It’s clearly a work of philosophy as well. And sociology/anthropology. And a… Read More ›

  • For the win!

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    What a great start for the Weston High School Math Team! In our first Massachusetts Math League meet of the year, our goal was a simple one: to beat Canton. Simple, but definitely not easy, as it almost never happens. And beat Canton… Read More ›

  • Station Eleven

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    Is Station Eleven a post-apocalyptic survival novel? Well, yes, in a way. Is it science fiction? Well, yes, in a way. But it’s not really either of these. In a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel has… Read More ›

  • My Stroke of Insight

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    What a promising book! My Stroke of Insight is an initially interesting but ultimately irritating work of non-fiction by Jill Bolte Taylor; I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by the author herself. The promise is that Dr. Taylor, a brain scientist… Read More ›

  • Desmos Redux

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    We had a productive workshop today, identifying and developing materials for using Desmos — primarily, but not exclusively, in Algebra 2 and Precalc 2.  There are at least two different ways to use Desmos: as a graphing calculator that’s much better than… Read More ›

  • I’ll Have What Phil’s Having

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    Completely inadvertently, I ended up watching two episodes of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having last night. I had never even heard of the show before, but it instantly hooked me when I saw the shot of the piazza in Panicale, a small hilltown (half… Read More ›

  • Lingo: Around Europe in sixty languages

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     An informal and totally unscientific poll tells me that most people don’t realize that there are 60 languages in Europe; they are certainly surprised to hear that actually there are considerably more than 60. Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren has written a slightly flawed… Read More ›

  • Dark Matter

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    “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” Right? This definition, as I’m sure you know ☺, is the opening sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a great work that I read at least twice, beginning back in college and then again… Read More ›

  • Introverted teachers

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    INTJ … What’s wrong with being an introvert? Nothing, of course. Nothing, that is, unless you buy into the dominant American value: extraversion good, introversion bad. I wasn’t even conscious that that was an American value until I had already been… Read More ›

  • Do you need help with Ulysses ? Of course you do.

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    J.D. Biersdorfer knows what she’s talking about: It’s O.K. to admit it: You tried to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and ended up chucking the thing aside in frustration. You are not alone. According to her letters, Virginia Woolf (“Never did I… Read More ›

  • Wilkes-Barre

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    Wilkes-Barre, PA, the garden spot of the universe! Well … no. But at least it’s Joe Biden’s home town, so I guess that’s something. Not that it has anything to do with why we were there. After I was finished with… Read More ›

  • Hollywood in Dorchester

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    What is an old Detroit police car doing on Ashmont Street in Dorchester? The answer, of course, is that they’re making a movie … and 2016 Dorchester is apparently a perfect stand-in for 1967 Detroit: The movie, which is directed… Read More ›

  • Playing with Fire

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    You probably think of Tess Gerritsen as the competent author of interesting genre novels featuring Rizzoli and Isles. Usually, after all, that’s exactly what she is. But Playing with Fire is something very different: part serious mainstream literature, part historical fiction, part… Read More ›

  • Old medicine

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    As you can see, the cover page of this book looks old enough — 151 years old, to be precise. But you’ll notice that the title refers to “Early England” and the sub-sub-title refers to “before the Norman conquest,” so… Read More ›

  • 15th Century crypto

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    If you’re sufficiently geeky, you will surely want to know something unexpected about the mathematics of functions and their inverses: cryptography in the 15th Century. Why? Because then we’re focusing on the transition from the monoalphabetic ciphers (such as Caesar,… Read More ›

  • A multilingual bookmark

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    I’ll have to give this as a puzzle to my incoming freshmen in September. You know how libraries give out free bookmarks as a service to their customers? (I’m sure it’s mostly just a way to discourage evil practices like… Read More ›

  • Spacing after periods

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    Three decades ago, when I was doing some contract work for a software company that shall go nameless, a co-worker suggested an optional plug-in for their flagship product. For a mere $5000.00, a customer could install a module that would… Read More ›

  • School Daze

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    Being forced out of one’s comfort zone is a good thing, right? So they say. But I’m not so sure. I just watched School Daze, a 1988 pseudo-comedy written, directed, and produced by Spike Lee, who also played one of the lead roles. It’s primarily about… Read More ›

  • Which language do they speak in Canada?

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    There’s something wrong with the question in the title of this piece, isn’t there? I had asked some students “What language do Canadians speak?” Some of them said English, a few said French, some said both English and French. One said… Read More ›