A righteous rant. As Glenn notes, a lot of web designers are young, with good eyesight, and monitors the size of a drive-in theater screen.
But now I’m thinking I should go look at my own style sheet.
Category Archives: Mathematics
High-School Physics
Regrets about sleeping through it.
Cosmos
Chad Orzell has some problems with the reboot. So do I and while it’s not his main concern, he puts his finger on it:
The bit where he called out young-Earth creationism for the impoverished scale of its vision was cute, too, though I’m not sure it was all that necessary or useful (in that the people who believe that won’t be watching, and wouldn’t be convinced), but then the show has clearly established a pattern of throwing red meat to the anti-religious from time to time.
Yes, if by “from time to time” he means every episode so far. I’m not traditionally religious, but I find it gratuitous and off putting. The writers and Tyson seem to get some sort of righteous satisfaction from putting a rhetorical thumb in the eyes of believers. It does not advance science, or their own secular religious cause.
Asimov’s Laws Of Robotics
Why they can’t protect us.
Unfortunately.
The Physics Of Roller Coasters
This article appears to have the physics right, but the spelling isn’t so great. No, the car doesn’t “loose” speed.
Simplicity On Complexity
Is climate linear or non-linear? As she says, this is the heart of the scientific debate. But even if it can be modeled as linear, we still don’t understand enough about the interactions to model it with confidence.
Space Is Really Really Empty
A scale map of the solar system, with the moon as a single pixel.
The New Math
Sorry, this seems like a ridiculous way to do subtraction (particularly for that problem which is trivially easy). And I can’t imagine how I’d do it in my head. Borrowing seems a lot easier to me.
The Pause
Causes and implications of it.
The biggest implication is that the models are worse than useless as a guide to policy on climate. And places like California are taking a wrecking ball to their economy for nothing.
The Fall Of The Software Commons
…is a myth. Eric Raymond on the history of open source, and the ahistorical knowledge of young programmers.