Poetry MP3 blog The Lipstick of Noise is back up and running.
Tag: blogs
Well, that WordPress 2.0 Themes Competition I entered has had 188 entries. Hmmm. I’m not sure I like those odds…
It’ll be interesting to see what people have come up with, and to find out what the judges were looking for.
Something Kevin said sent me towards an article in the Washington Post about the uselessness of algebra to normal life, and the ensuing mouth-frothing response in the comments over at Pharyngula.
Two things I’d say. It rather makes me despair to see people talk about algebra as though it was advanced mathematics. Algebra is hardly even a branch of mathematics; it’s just a notational tool to allow you to move beyond arithmetic. It’s not quite true to say that it’s impossible to do any maths more advanced than arithmetic without algebra; the ancient Greeks managed without, for example. But it’s certainly completely central to the way maths is done today. Unless you think that high school should be satisfied with achieving no more than basic literacy and numeracy, passing a one-year course in basic algebra is not an outrageously high standard to hold for high-school graduation. Depending what you think a high-school diploma should stand for, it might even be an outrageously low standard. Judging by the article, this girl who couldn’t graduate because she didn’t pass algebra actually didn’t have basic numeracy skills, which means both that she shouldn’t be qualifying high school and that the school system has competely failed her.
The other point I’d make about the ‘I’ve never needed to use maths since I left school’ argument is that we all forget a large proprtion of what we learned in school unless we use it frequently. I did maths to quite an advanced level at school; I did two maths A-levels, which, for non-UK readers, meant I got as far as complex numbers, basic calculus, polar functions, basic mechanics, some statistics including things like Poisson distributions.
I can’t actually do any of that maths anymore. But having done it does mean that I’m not intimidated by equations; that I know what a standard deviation is, and a tangent and a function, and what binary numbers are, and what calculus is useful for so on. It’s not enough to enable me to do anything much, but understanding the concepts makes it easier to read popular science books, for example, or to make some kind of judgement about how useful a statistic is.
I also think that as a result, I’m much more comfortable than I would otherwise have been doing the kind of maths that *does* come up in everyday life. It’s good that schools teach a bit more than the students will really need, because hopefully that means the important suff will have a chance to really get properly absorbed.
I’ve just added The Loom to the linkroll. The Loom is the blog of Carl Zimmer, who wrote the excellent and rivetingly eye-opening Parasite Rex, as well as the excellent but marginally less riveting At the Water’s Edge. They’re both worth reading, but the parasite one would be my recommendation just because the subject matter is that bit more unusual. Anyway, I was reading a long discussion in the comments about how to sell evolution to the public, and it reminded me a of a point I’ve been meaning to make for a while.
The ID movement’s current Big Idea is a rather technical attack on the mechanism of natural selection. It looks good because they appear to be engaging with biologists on their own ground, rather than relying on appeals to scripture. On the other hand, the point which seems to have the most visceral appeal to the public is the question “do you believe that you are descended from an ape?”
But there are two questions here. The idea of ‘evolution’ – that all form of life on earth share common ancestors, that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are similar to Pileated Woodpeckers because they are actually related to each other, and yes, that we are descended from apes – is independent of natural selection. There were evolutionists before Darwin. And the weight of evidence for evolution is overwhelming.
An analogy: Newton said that a dropped apple falls to the ground because all objects are attracted to each other by gravity in proportion to their mass. Whether that’s true or not, the apple still falls. Someone who rejected Newtonian mechanics would not therefore expect apples to float in midair; apples definitely fall, and the only question is why.
Even if IDists have found a fatal flaw in natural selection*, it doesn’t make any of the evidence for evolution disappear. We are definitely descended from apes (and reptiles and fish and little wormy things). Natural selection is by far the best explanation we have for how it happened, but the evidence for evolution is now so strong that if natural selection was disproved, we would need another evolutionary explanation to replace it.
*they haven’t
From the very cool DDE. Not good news for those of us south of the river.
Categories
Cambodian Hip Hop
from The Ten Thousand Things. Make sure you read the article from the Phnom Penh Post. And listen to the mp3.